I made an Adult dress to wear in public!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have have made my first adult dress that I would wear in public!!!!!!! I bought McCall's Pattern M6O73 sizez 18W - 20W- 22W-24W about 3 weeks ago.

I used fabric bought from Wal-Mart 5 years ago. The finished product is beautiful!

From making this dress, I learned two new sewing skills! This dress has a V-Neckline on the back bodice and requires elastic to be sewn in at the shoulders and the waistband.

V-Neckline

I am still trying to perfect the V-Neckline. I am going to make this dress again until I make V-Neckline in the back bodice of the dress correctly.

Elastic

This dress requires that Elastic be sewn in at the shoulders for gathering. The instructions direct to pull the elastic as tight as one can as one sews in the elastic. With this being my first time having done this, I stretched the elastic from one end towards me which cause the fabric not to feed forth and the thread to bunch. After looking for videos on YouTube about sewing in elastic, I learned that you have to stretch both ends of the elastic so the fabric and elastic will feed through.


Adjustments

I increased the patttern sized by 2, because I wanted to make sure that the dress didn't fit exact. To increase the pattern size, I traced the pattern onto wax paper using a permanent marker. This work perfectly because the permanent marker was soft enough not to tear the wax paper and it didn't easily smear either. Next, I measure the width of each size increase on the pattern, then I added two more in those areas. The areas of the pattern that did not show the size increase, I copied exactly. When choosing this method, one has to remember to center things such as a waistband that need to be center should the size be increased.