Little Black Dress 2019

This post may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something from a link I may receive a commission from your purchase.

Update 12/6/2019: I won the social media portion of the contest! Thank you for voting for my dress on Facebook!

The Las Vegas Fashion Council hosts a Little Black Dress contest annually. I participated in it in 2016 and 2017. They took 2018 to revamp the contest, so they didn’t have one last year, but this year it’s happening again! I’m really excited. I was in school the first two years and I loved the dresses I made at the time, but now I kind of hate the 2016 dress. It was not my best work, but I did learn a lot from it though. The 2017 dress was amazing and I’m going to make it for myself eventually, but in red! I definitely need some new dresses in my life.

The deadline to finish the dress was Tuesday Nov. 26th. I barely got it done in time. I scheduled to take pictures in the very last time slot, but I made it!

Design Inspiration

When I was in High School I had a maroon knit shirt that had ruching detail right on the front. It was my favorite shirt at the time and I still miss it. During the same time I also found a Simplicity Pattern that I loved so much I made the dress 3 times. The thing they both had in common was the ruching. I loved ruching then and I still love it now. So I decided that this year’s dress would have that ruching detail too. The dress has classic princess seams to the waist and of course the skirt is a full circle. I have to stay to true to my love of circle skirts!

Overlay

The underskirt is a cotton sateen and the overlay is nylon chiffon, only because silk chiffon was out of my budget. Chiffon is tough to work with since it’s slippery and also frays like crazy! When you work with slippery fabrics it helps to use spray starch to stiffen it and/or use tissue paper between layers to keep them from slipping while you sew. Thankfully I had spray starch on hand, it helped stiffen the fabric for cutting so I could cut accurately. The side seams were sewn with a French seam and I used a polyester satin bias tape for the hem, which is a little longer than the cotton sateen underskirt.

Pockets

I LOVE pockets! Who doesn’t love to have functioning pockets in their clothes? The only thing worse than not having pockets at all is having fake pockets or tiny pockets that barely hold anything. My Little Black Dress for 2019 definitely has pockets! Nice big functioning pockets which are hidden in the side seams. The tricky part of the pockets was actually the pocket opening in the overlay. Chiffon frays so much that I had to come up with a way to enclose the seams but also have part of the seam open to access the pockets. I ended up using the same polyester satin bias tape as the hem to encase the seam allowance for the opening. I top-stitched around the bias tape to keep it secure and hand sewed it to the pocket opening to make accessing the pocket easy.

The Inside

The inside of a garment is just as important as the outside. If care isn’t taken to keep the seams from fraying there’s a higher probability of it falling apart. When I first started sewing I didn’t care what the inside looked like because the outside was all anyone would see. I didn’t have a serger then, so the majority of the clothing I made had raw seams or was lined to cover the raw seams. I wanted the inside of my LBD 2019 to look immaculate, but my serger is out of commission until I can take it to the shop. Despite not having a serger handy, I used this polka dot cotton twill for the lining of the bodice, it’s super cute! I also had 1/4″ double fold cotton/poly bias tape on hand, so I used that to encase the raw edges of the skirt seams. The inside looks just as good as the outside does and I’m so grateful that my skills have developed so much over the last 16 years.

I made the dress over 3 days, working a total of 32 hours from patterning to sewing to finishing. I used about 2 yards of cotton sateen, 2 yards of nylon chiffon, 1/2 yard of cotton twill, 14 yards of bias tape, an invisible zipper, 1 hook and eye and a whole lot of thread. The result is a beautiful dress I get to show off on Thursday at the Little Black Dress Event.

My favorite part, beyond the pockets of course, it the lining. It’s a white cotton twill with black polka dots. It’s a little bit of Dianna flair and way more fun than a basic black lining.

Watch my social media for the process and details of my dress. You can vote for my dress here. I’ll update with the results of the contest on December 6th.

Wish me luck! 🙂