Make That Look: Cache Cache Dress

This past weekend it was unusually cold for July and it rained almost incessantly for two days. So what can one do when the weather is not suitable for hiking, but sew a new summer dress :)

I am especially proud with this one as
1) it is a replica of a ready-to-wear dress by Cache Cache, which I bought for Gaby five years ago, so I had to come up with a pattern on my own; and
2) I managed to make the dress out of a very small piece of remnant fabric I bought from my favourite fabric store downtown - a large piece of about 60 cm in length and a small band approx 20-21 cm in length.

I liked the fabric - high quality dense cotton, which looked perfect for a dress, if only I had enough of it. I had almost given up and decided to make it into a skirt, when Gaby put on her Cache Cache dress to go out. I took a good look at the design and it occurred to me that the narrow band could be enough for the upper bodice and the straps and the larger piece could yield the skirt of the dress.

For the skirt I used the modified pattern pieces of this dress I made last September - Shkatulka WD240418. I had to play pattern tetris and further narrow the pieces to make them fit my scarce piece of fabric.

The upper bodice is a from another Shkatulka dress -WD150719. I cut the front parts with the princess seams, rounded the underarms and designed the upper band. For both the skirt and the bodice I used dresses Russian size 40 (EU size 34, XS). The back is a shirred rectangle, 1.5 times the width of my back, done with black elastic thread at 1 cm intervals.
And then I repeated the process for the lining, which is a black cotton voile.

The dress goes well with my black Miette, knitted in 2013 and still loved:

To be honest, I was very skeptical I could pull the look, as this dress pattern seems a bit young for me. But daughter and husband assured me that my worries were stupid and I'm glad they did - I love my new dress and I feel very feminine in it.

The inside of the dress - the shirred piece of the back is tucked neatly between the outer and the lining of the front.

To avoid too much volume from the gathering of both skirts, I sewed the gather seams through both fabrics, thus treating them as one skirt - thus the gathers are not so bulky. To reinforce the shirred back, I inserted 4 mm wide elastic in the upper and lower seams of the back bodice.