Lilac Striped Maternity Dress - DONE!

I finished my Lilac Striped Maternity dress in time for our late-June event.  It was a dream to wear! So light and airy! The temperatures were very warm that weekend (though there was a nice breeze, fortunately) and I was perfectly comfortable all weekend! The only issue that I had with it was I had some gapping down the front of the bodice (which I fixed with a couple of straight pins)--but that was because I didn't put enough hooks and eyes on it (because I ran out).  I added more hooks and eyes to it to fix that.

Inspiration Sleeves

The dress has a half-high lining and v-neck to maximize the coolness of the fabric.  The idea for the sleeves came from an auction site dress.  I'm so pleased with how they came out.  I wanted to trim it like the original and spent hours on cutting, sewing, pressing, and gathering (BOTH edges) many inches of bias trim, only to decide that I really didn't like it and just liked the plain way better!

As mentioned previously, I used FFC's Blue Hydrangea Lawn fabric for the dress.  The bodice is lined in bleached muslin--the skirt and sleeves are unlined.

Since this is a maternity dress, it needed to be able to be somewhat adjustable to grow with my growing belly! Elizabeth Clark wrote a VERY timely article, "Great Expectations", that I found very helpful in planning how to do my dress.

I originally had the 1/4" twill tapes coming out at center front, but decided to have them tie at the sides instead.  The reason I switched them was because they were rather bulky to try to hide in the front.  The downside is it's pretty hard to adjust them by yourself without taking the dress off--however the upside is that once they're tied to your current measurements you don't have to mess with them again (at least, until you grow or shrink).

I think, now that I'm not pregnant (and probably won't be, again), I'll take it apart and gather it down to a smaller band to be a "regular" dress.  It's such a FUN dress to wear, I want to be able to wear it for regular summer use!