Hello everyone it's Laineemakes here, I'm back with another project for the Minerva Brand Ambassadors. The project this time is using this beautiful silky satin charmeuse fabric. It’s a sleek lightweight polyester fabric with a lovely hand. It's very light and almost sheer, so you may need to line it or wear a slip underneath it when made up as a dress.

There's been a lot of tiered dress patterns around in the last couple of years and I've been as usual hovering on the outside, hesitating to take the plunge into this particular style pool. I'm not usually a floaty dress type of person nor am I a ‘you must have it because everybody else is having it’ type of person either. However, I've seen enough of these dresses on different people to keep me intrigued.

Of course, there are so many tiered dress patterns out there I found it hard to decide and so I started to look through my pattern stash. I came across a blouse pattern in my Vogue collection - a relatively recent Rachel Comey floaty blouse pattern, V1618 and I had the idea that I could hack this into the sort of floaty dress I’ve been looking at.

Inspired by a maxi dress challenge earlier this year, I lengthened the blouse until it was ankle length. As the dress is quite wide already I decided not to add tiers as I felt it had enough volume and flounce. The pattern says it's advanced, I think this is because the pattern calls for French seams which I think is a good option for this fabric and I used the narrow hem foot for the sleeve flounces and the bottom hem.

This kind of silky fabric obviously was a bit shifty when cutting and sewing. take care while you're using it. Make sure it's straight in all directions before you cut it so that your pieces aren't distorted.

As I was making this dress up, I put it on to test it and I got some distinct nightdress vibes from it and it made me think that this fabric would be perfect for a glamorous dressing gown or nightie or pyjamas if you were so inclined.

I'm very pleased with the finished dress. It turned out really pretty but it did give me a dilemma about the length. I'd started off intending to make a maxi dress but I think wearing it unbelted like the blouse definitely gave that nightie vibe. I added a long belt and cinched it in at the waist and worn ankle well length I thought was a beautiful special occasion dress. I've also worn it out with the body pulled up in a blouson effect with the length just about at the knee the found that gave a really nice day dress look so I'm actually delighted to come up with two looks for one in this gorgeous floral print. I’m looking forward to creating more looks like this in the future.

See you next time.