Sunshine in the form of a dress

I was asked by my dear friend Tiina to replicate her favorite dress, a dress she had bought on vacation that was now falling apart. 

The shape was fairly simple: the back consisted of one piece in jersey and the front was made by layers of jersey and a lighter fabric. Because of the jersey the fitting wasn't an issue, but the construction of the front was trickier than I expected. 

The beloved original dress, un-ironed, whoops.

I cut the dress apart and numbered the front pieces: jersey number five and chiffon number five go together and so forth.

I used the numbered pieces from the original dress as pattern pieces.

The front pieces are curved, which led to 1) they took up more fabric than expected and 2) the finishing of the lower edge caused a meltdown on my part. See the plan was to use a rolled hem, because the original dress had something similar. Well, this fabric wouldn't have any of it. I guess it has something to do with the edge being curved, but the finishing kept "falling off": the fabric ripped above the seam, no matter how many times I tried. By this point, something that was meant to be fairly simple turned out to be much more time consuming and the only thing that kept me from throwing the serger out the window was thinking about how much it would cost to replace it (I'm sorry Tiina, but that's the honest-to-god truth).

I added length to the dress by adding layers of jersey and chiffon. This involved some math which I got wrong had no problem with. 

Instead I finished the edge with the serger, pressed it under and topstitched. It actually looks better this way, and it wasn't difficult at all, but you all know how annoying it is when you don't get to do something your way.

One happy, beautiful customer!

It all came together in the end, and both Tiina and I are happy with the result. Any words of wisdom when replicating something? Mark the pieces! Apart from that - go for it! Chances are you will end up with something well-fitting and lots-of-wear-getting on your first try.

PS. Fall is here! And I'm still sewing summer tops, since I'm trying very very hard not to leave any UFOs behind. And also, because, just a little bit of denial.

PPS. I'm sorry about the blue-ish hue and smurf-like complexion in some of the pictures. Blogger wouldn't play nicely this time either and something evil happened when I uploaded the pictures. Was able to fix the worst though.