This dress took me 3 years to make. I wasn’t working on the dress that whole time, but from the time I bought the fabric and made a plan to sew it to the time I actually sewed the last stitches, it was about a 3 year process.

Let me wind us back a bit - in 2018, I had recently repatriated to the US from Australia, and I was working a minimum wage yarn store job. Karen Templer was hosting her yearly “Summer of Basics” and while I am not really one for internet challenges (they stress me out, tbh), this time I was allured in by the prospect of trading some internet content I’d make (ie instagram posts) with the yarn store for some yarn. I thought I’d test my internet-challenge-disliking-self to see if maybe I was wrong about my dislike. You’ve probably guessed by now that I did not, in fact, surprise myself.

I wrote about my plans for Summer of Basics here, one of which was Dress No. 2 by Sonya Philip (or sort of this dress, I took it in a fairly different direction, you may notice). My coworker helped me cut out my fabric on a big table after the store had closed one night, and we set up sewing machines at her house to start on our respective projects. Everything about the dress confused and challenged me - the slippery linen felt impossible to wrangle, and I was constantly frustrated. I got as far as sewing up the side seams, without even trying to “finish” them, and stopped.

Nearly three years passed. I moved house 3 times, left the fabric store, got a job at a startup, visited Australia, and ended up having two other jobs. I moved in with Josh. I slowly started sewing other things, learning bits and pieces here and there, getting more comfortable with my machine.

Recently, I decided to try to finish this dress, although I wasn’t sure I would particularly like or wear it in the end. I hacked away at it - I cut back some width from the shoulders, raised the neckline, cut the length shorter than I had originally (when I cut the pattern out, a couple of years before this, my friend helped me make a pattern block that was longer than the original pattern, to accommodate my long legs). I improvised some side seam pockets out of the excess fabric I had, and I french seamed the whole thing together. I applied bias binding to the arm and neck holes & felt pretty pleased with how they looked. I sewed it with cotton thread so that I can decide to dye it in the future (the linen is less opaque than I’d hoped, and I am not big on wearing bras).

It’s not my dream dress. There are lessons I’ll take about fit and drape from this project, but mostly I’m just pleased with myself for having finished it. I think so often we end up with languishing projects, feeling guilty for “wasting” materials, or sad that we let our projects languish at all. But I’m coming to believe that this guilt isn’t warranted - there will be a time for us to finish our in-progress projects, even if it is literal years later. Who knows? Maybe like me, your skills will have improved, and your willingness to try will have expanded? Sometimes a dress will take 3 years to make, and sometimes what started as a dress will not end up as a dress, and I really think that’s okay. These things often have a way of working themselves out.