Pleated Marble Dress

Another wedding season means more dresses! I was determined to sew at least one new dress this year, especially since I had such success with my first party dress.


I still feel most confident sewing with cotton, so I made a quick trip to the workroom and picked up a beautiful pale sage marbled print by Princess Mirah Batiks.

I was inspired by this beautiful pleated strapless dress by BCBG and decided to modify the Mary Adams pattern to have a fitted pleated dress.

Modifying dress patterns is hard! There's a lot of math to get everything to fit just right. I knew I wanted to create the pleated detail, add pockets, and even try to mimic the peekaboo lining.

I think I was quite successful in achieving all three details. The difficulty with a cotton dress is that it tends to wrinkle, and doesn't fall or drape as nicely as a more silky fabric.  I think I should have made the lining out of a different fabric so it didn't stick to the cotton dress as much.

In the end, dress number 2 from Mary Adam's dress book was still great.  It's such a great pattern that can be used over and over with slight modifications (but not without a little headache)!