Floral Flouce Wrap Dress (The Elianna)

April 2019--Here is Eesa's Spring/Easter 2019 Dress! Let me tell you, this was one epic dress. Hindsight--I probably wouldn't have bothered to purchase this pattern had I known how involved it was/is, not to mention the crazy amount of fabric involved in creating it. The pattern I used is VFT's Elianna Dress. The downloaded file of this pattern is HUGE. It's 171 pages! Even with the layered sizes, it kept printing, and printing, and printing...and then I had to assemble the printed pattern pieces together, and that took forever. And that's only just the pattern assembly itself. For a size 8, this pattern requires 11-12 yards of fabric! Yep, that's right. I had to go back and look at the pdf pattern file to double check. Fortunately, I didn't end up actually using that much fabric (VFT tends to overestimate fabric requirements). I saved fabric by not lining the bottom flounces, and for the flounces along the bodice, I used inexpensive white fabric that was most likely from a king-sized sheet I found at Goodwill. I can't recall the exact yardage I bought, but I do remember I bought $40 worth of this floral fabric from Walmart, so at $5/yard--I guess I used 8 yards for this dress. With the exception of one other dress--which is a very special dress, and I'll post about that later-- I've NEVER spent that much money to make a dress. Not even to buy a dress off the rack. As for the actual construction of the dress...I guess it came together okay. It's a wrap dress and I got confused along the way, so my dress actually wraps the opposite way then the pattern calls for, but I don't think that matters one bit. Fortunately, this dress turned out so gorgeous! Eesa wore it a handful of times, but not as much as I would have liked. At least, not enough to make all that work and money that I put into this dress worth it.
I decided since I already spent soooo much time printing and assembling the pattern, that I might as well make a dress for Eesa's cousin Aaliyah. I bought a twin-size sheet set and cut it up for fabric so the dress wasn't so pricey. I think the sheet set was only $10.  I couldn't find sheets with cute prints, so I chose a solid navy blue. The sheet set was (thin-ish) polyester, so I got a nice drape out of the 2nd Elianna. I don't have pictures of it, but I did get a video of Eesa trying it on, which is in a way even better that pictures!