Zachary's Graduation and Another Tessa Sheath Dress

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It's hard to believe, but we celebrated Zachary's high school graduation a little over a week ago. How am I old enough to have two children graduated?? Because of Covid, Aiden's 2020 graduation ended up being a virtual event we watched sitting in our family room, so it felt especially good to actually get to celebrate Zach's graduation properly. Here's Zach giving his speech as valedictorian.

One bonus of getting to celebrate properly was that my Mom was able to come from Nova Scotia and she has always been the family's official photographer, so we got family pictures, too. Unfortunately, Aiden is still away at school, so we didn't get to have him here for the weekend or for the pictures.

Zach really isn't fond of having his picture taken, so he wasn't keen on the whole picture thing to begin with, and then the weather was cold and damp, so we couldn't convince him to do outdoor pictures. Instead, we went to the school gym, which was decorated for the graduation. Sometimes we were serious...

Other times, not so much!

I made my dress, using the Tessa Sheath Dress pattern from Love Notions. This is the fourth Tessa I've made and I made a couple of changes to this one. On the other dresses, the seam where the sleeve joins the bodice sat way in from my shoulder, so on this one I did a broad shoulder adjustment which fixed that problem completely. Now I'm anxious to try it on another pattern where I had the same issue. 

I'm 5'2", so I feel very short standing next to Zachary's 6'1"! 

Because of my height (or lack thereof!), I took an inch out of the vertical space between waist and hips on the pattern, to try to get the hip line to actually line up with my hips. I then added the inch back at the bottom hem so the dress wouldn't be shorter overall. I think I need to tweak something else at the hip level, though. It doesn't show up in the pictures, but there's still a little extra fabric that sticks out oddly right at the hips. Most people probably wouldn't ever notice it, but if I'm going to make my own clothes, I might as well get them to fit perfectly, right?

I used a cotton/spandex jersey knit from Black Rabbit Fabrics to make the dress, so it's super comfortable. It's essentially a fancy-looking, long tshirt!

Lots of quilters are scared to try sewing clothes (I was for years), but I can assure you that quilters can learn to sew clothes! It took me a long, long time to convince myself to make the leap to sewing clothes, and then even longer to try sewing with knits, but now I'm so glad I did. There's still so much to learn, but I absolutely love getting to wear clothes I've made myself 😊

That's two high school graduations down, and one to go! Nathan's graduation will be in four years, which I'm sure will pass in a blink.