On the road to Christmas (part 2) - Bodice

Welcome to part 2 of 'On the road to Christmas', where I take you along in the process of making my dress for the Christmas ball. This week I'll show you how I made the bodice of my dress.

First on the program was, of course, creating the pattern. I slightly adjusted the pattern of the leotard of my Latin dress to form the pattern for the bodice of this dress. Because I wasn't super happy about the placement of the skirt on my Latin dress I chose this time to first create the leotard in whole and cut this in half later after the skirt is also finished.

Leotard pattern, front and back

I wanted long sleeves on this dress, made from the mesh I bought recently, and I wanted the sleeves to join up in the neck, which is why I had to create a raglan-like sleeve. Using a (regular) sleeve pattern of a pattern I already had I created the pattern. Initially I created it using pattern paper after which I made the sleeve out of a scrap of stretch cotton. After a few adjustments to this sleeve I unpicked it and decided to use the unpicked cotton sleeve as the pattern.

Sleeve pattern (excuse the wrinkles..)

Then came the cutting of and putting together the leotard. Because I wanted a low back I of course cannot wear a bra with it, which is why I created a double front (smaller than the leotard itself), reinforced with strong elastic.

After putting everything together (using a zigzag stitch) the leotard now looks as shown on the picture below.

Next in this series will be the skirt (or rather, skirts) and putting it on the leotard. As soon as the dress is finished, I'll also show how it looks on.

See you next week!

-Love, Marieke