Since Bret and Taylor were gone fishing, I had the opportunity to have some uninterrupted sewing time - enough time to finish my Duro dress!

Let me start off by saying that I made the dress as is. I think that everything fit well until it came to the length. 'Vertically Challenged' individuals, such as myself, should really think about altering this pattern BEFORE sewing it. Take a look:

There's a lot of material going on between the midriff band and the bottom band - with these little stubs of legs peaking out from the hem. I think that this dress actually made me look shorter and look like I might be 'expecting'. I definately couldn't wear it out like this, so I went back to the drawing board. I had two options: 1) cut this off to a more flattering length or 2) make this into a top similar to Hot Pattern's Wong-Singh-Jones Shanghai Tunic. I decided to go for option one since I could always go back and make this a top.

So, I decided that this dress needed to be above the knee - sort of a babydoll Duro. Doing this required me to take off 4 inches on the dress itself and about an inch on the bottom band (the bottom band is pretty large and I think that it needed to be scaled down some). Taking off 4 inches in length also took off some of the 'flare' at the bottom, which I also think looks a bit more flattering on me as well (I think that the total circumfernce of the bottom hem was about 10" smaller than the original size). With all those alterations, here is my completed Duro:

You can't get the full effect of how much better this looks since Taylor was my photographer and cut off my feet in the picture, but I think you get the general idea. She also liked this dress quite a bit and said it looked like something you would see on Project Runway (so you know that it looks very trendy). Now, my next challenge is to find some shoes to go with this dress!

The fabric that I've designated for the Duro style dress has now been cut, so I'm ready to sew!

The ethnic print didn't wash up as soft as I had hoped. Since it was a cotton, I was counting on it to have a much softer hand - I suppose that will happen over time. I had originally purchased some solid white cotton for the bands and ties of the dress, but after cutting out one band, I could tell that this fabric was not going to work. It was just to plain. I had to run some errands yesterday anyway, so I stopped off to find some new fabric (oh, and I picked up what will be Taylor's Halloween costume in the process - yes, it's early, but she starts think about Halloween as soon as school starts). I did find some zebra print fabric that seemed to work well, but decided to come home empty handed. It's a good thing that I did, because I remembered that I had several yards of a suede-like cheetah print that has been sitting in my stash for quite some time! Needless to say, it will become my new banding fabric. With all that said, I'm off to fire up the sewing machine!