Celeste Dress

It had been a while, so I decided to try an indie pattern again.

I’d seen images of a laced up bodice dress on Pinterest and then saw this pattern on poeticmemorysewing’s Instagram account, and I hunted out the design. It didn’t look complicated so I enthusiastically dove in thinking “Let’s give it a go”.

This is the Oh Me Oh My – Celeste dress pattern. There are two views and two styles of lacing. You have to double check which pieces and cutting lines to use for your view. I decided to make the sleeveless bodice with full waistband.

It’s kind of similar to the Gunne Sax style, prairie dresses that have been released by Simplicity recently. I printed it all out, taped it all together, and what I noticed was that it didn’t have any size numbers on the Pattern pieces. It just had a key with different styles of lines in slightly different shades of colours to indicate each size. 

Two of the pattern pieces were wholly unidentifiable to figure out what size was for what line as they didn’t seem go in a sequential order. And the colours and styles of some lines were too similar which meant that you couldn’t trust the line that you thought you were you were using.

Either the wrong size line style had been used during grading. Or it was graded in an odd way that meant say the size 12 would be bigger than the size 14.

Basically I started with a size 10 toile but I ended up having to take 6cm out of the width of the bodice and 2cm out of the length. And doing quite an aggressive bit of pinching out of the upper cups to get those to fit as well. I also reduced the height of the waistband by about 1.5cm.

After sorting the fit, and adding a little bit of extra coverage across the open neckline, I starting having quite a lot of fun sewing this up.

That was until I nearly broke my finger on my sewing machine by being just ever so slightly distracted, lifting my hand at the wrong time when the machine was still working and my finger getting trapped in the mechanism. Fortunately, I just snapped my nail off and bruised my finger. Sad sad times.

My fabric was a lovely linen viscose blend from Abakhan, which is from their remnant section… meaning there’s no more, so you’ve cut it and you don’t have enough, you’re stuck.

Instruction, wise, there was a lot of extra detail that would help a beginner. But I think not being able to trust the size you’ve chosen is a pretty red flag. This brand seem to do a lot of children’s patterns, which may be more their bread-and-butter.

All of the pattern seam allowances (aside from a few small places) were half an inch, which most European machines don’t really have a prominently needle plate marking for… so I ended up using a piece of masking tape to mark the position for easy reference. Yes I could have moved my needle to let me work with a 1.5cm seam but because there was a lot of edge stitching, eg bias binding, narrow ties etc I didn’t want to have one needle setting for all my top stitching and another needle setting for regular seams.

The pattern gives instructions for creating a multi-tiered skirt using rectangle measurements. I was just not certain I had enough fabric, so I created a 2-tier skirt with my own measurements gathered and attached together, and then I really wish I’d added pockets.

To make it more fun for me. I used dark pink overlocking threads that popped on the inside of the garment, dark pink bias binding around the neckline and a dark pink zipper, so everything was coordinated inside. Even if I’m the only one who sees it, it does look quite fun.

This was the perfect dress to explore Portmeirion in Wales. It was a very hot day and the linen kept me from overheating. Plus we fit right in with our bright outfits amongst the colourful buildings and gardens!!