Super space dress three million

For the past couple weeks I've been strangely determined to find galaxy print fabric. There's a lot of galaxy print stuff floating around these days, and it's always caught my attention. I don't really care about trendy things for the most part, but eh... this is pretty cool.

Anyways, I spent a while looking for a woven cotton with galaxy print that pleased me and didn't cost a bajillion dollars. This apparently doesn't exist. Then one day I got home to a package waiting for me... did I order something and forget about it? It's happened before, but not this time. Turns out my friend Bria gifted me with some awesome galaxy print fabric! It's a knit not woven, but heavy enough that it acts more like a woven would (for example, I had to use princess seams because it wasn't stretchy/form fitting enough when cut flat like for a typical knit dress).

I was so excited to make a dress that I just kind of started cutting, so there's some things wrong with the final product that could have easily been avoided. The hem is a touch shorter than I wanted (I cut it expecting not to fold a hem under, but then I did), and the waist is a bit too high. When I cut the front pieces using a pattern I had around (I think it was from McCalls, but I don't remember which one), I had to reduce the width of the pieces by the seam allowance. Somehow this caused the side front pieces to be much shorter than the center front piece, and when I evened them out the waist became too high. Not much I could do though without re-cutting and this fabric was too precious for such things. Other than that, the bodice fits quite well.

For the back, I used this netting I recently picked up (also in navy and yellow... I had no plan for any of them at the time). Netting like this is one of the worst things to sew. It's literally holes. There's so little fabric for other things to attach to. I figured I'd bind all the edges, but it's super hard to tell how much to stretch the netting while binding for it to lay flat when on a person. The binding also didn't play well with the knit, so I ended up cutting it off the front and just rolling those hems.

Here you can see my poor attempt at binding. The back neckline sticks out a bit (some more ironing might fix this, maybe), and there is some ugly joining at the shoulders. It's not overly visible since my hair typically covers this part anyways. 

Because of the lack of structural integrity in the netting, I also bound the back waistline seam and added some elastic for extra support. I used french seams on the sides and shoulders for similar reasons.

In conclusion, yay space dress!