I started sewing in 2013 and when I look back at some of the things I made back in those days, I realize not all of them were real winners. In fact some of them I wore once to take photos and then never wore again. You know those times when an outfit just doesn’t fit right, you keep it in your closet, but you never end up wearing it? Yeah. That’s what happened with some of my earlier DIY creations. So I have decided to go back to some of these dress patterns and see where I went wrong. I decided to start with the Tank Dress by Sew Caroline.
I made my first Tank Dress, as seen above, in 2014 and it wasn’t bad but it also wasn’t great. The waist was too cinched in the back, which pulled it really tight in the front, so I tried to cover that problem with a belt. The fabric I chose, while it would of been great used as an accent fabric or a trim fabric for a quilt, was just blah when used for an entire dress. It was also a woven fabric so it didn’t drape and flow as nice as I wanted it to. Also I think my bias tape was thicker than the fabric so it made the neck line pull away from my body. So overall, not my best work but hey, I was still learning! 
So to address the first issue, I decided to cut the same size Medium for the dress pattern and the elastic casing as I did on my first Tank Dress, but cut a size XL for the elastic piece. This gave it the same nice cinched back but a little more subtle. It was a much better fit. (I don’t have a photo of the back of the dress but you can trust, its much better this way!)
For the fabric, I was so excited to cut into this beautiful Les Fleurs Birch rayon challis from the Rifle Paper Co collection for Cotton + Steel Fabrics. This fabric feels like butter on your skin and drapes just perfectly. It found it to be easier to do the rounded hem on the bottom in this rayon than in a stiff woven. And this fabric works great for any summer time dress. Light enough to wear in the hot temperatures, but does not need to be lined like a voile. Please excuse the wrinkles in the photographs. Yes this fabric wrinkles but I was on vacation and who cares! 
Both fabric and sewing pattern can be found at Indiesew.com 
These photos were taken by Will last weekend on our last summer vacation of the year. Will took Liam and me to Miami Beach for a birthday getaway and I wore the dress all weekend as a swim suit coverup on our way to the pool, where we spent the majority of the trip, eating strawberries and drinking smoothies! I’d like to say I got a lot of compliments on the dress, but when half of the girls at the Fontainbleau hotel were walking around in thongs, trust me, nobody was looking at my hand made dress! And yes I know the fear of Zika virus was in the air down there in Miami, but we like to live on the wild size (meaning we covered ourselves and the baby head to toe in bug spray and we were back in our hotel room before dusk. Like I said, we are wild ones!)
