Wilder Gown Turned Ogden Dress

This is the tale of a dress that started one place and ended up in a very different one. It got cut apart two different times before it reached its current form, which is a tiered maxi dress based on the Ogden cami that I happen to love! However, it started as an Epic Sewing Fail.

Once upon a time, back in January, I had dreams of a white linen Wilder Gown. Everyone was making the pattern, and I was looking for maxi dress patterns that had good coverage to try out for my planned trip to India in the summer so I could stay hidden from the sun. I got the most beautiful lightweight linen, cut right into it, and promptly made the most frumpy (accidental) nightgown I have ever worn. My facial expression below is a very accurate summary of how it made me feel when I put it on.

I liked the tiers, but the bodice. Good grief. I just really don’t think this pattern and me is a good fit at all. I don’t like how the sleeves/underarm look on me, the neckline is way too high for my liking, and there’s so much fabric up top. This is not to say that it’s a bad pattern, because I have seen so many beautiful versions online, and yes, the fabric choice definitely contributed to my woes, and TOTALLY I could have tweaked the pattern to get a better fit in terms of the arms. But the reality is that I just don’t like the style on me so changing the fit and trying a different fabric would have been a waste of time and fabric. Here’s a couple more photos of it just so you can see its true nightgown glory pre-hack.

So I cut the entire bodice off and put it in my fabric recycling bag to be turned into stuffing for a pouf at a later date. I gave up on the idea of it being good sun protection and focussed on just making it a dress I would actually wear. (My friend and I rescheduled our trip to India before any pandemic-related stuff even started happening outside of China because we were both a bit up-in-the-air on our summer schedules, which turned out for the best anyway.) I had enough fabric left to cut out an Ogden cami bodice to attach the skirt to. I shortened it by an amount that I didn’t write down, but it turned out to be the wrong amount and the waist seam was in an unflattering location on me, so I ended up hacking the skirt off AGAIN and shortening the bodice to the length you see below, otherwise known as “very short”.

I was concerned about the weight of the giant skirt from the Wilder stretching out the skinny straps of the Ogden, so I inserted some thin twill tape into the straps after I sewed them but before attaching them to the bodice. It seems to have worked! I wore the dress out in the world for the first time two days ago (when it was 34C out instead of being snowy!) and it was the perfect garment to get a breeze going around my legs but keep me covered from the sun, aside from my shoulders. I’m definitely not used to wearing all white though: I felt very paranoid about not spilling things on it because I’m a pretty haphazard person a lot of the time!

You’re probably wondering about the photos. Even before I actually made the Wilder, I thought that a white linen maxi dress would be really dramatic visually and it would be cool if I could get some photos of it in a setting that showed that off. My very good friend Drew Amyot is a really skilled photographer and I love his work. I asked him if he’d be willing to take photos of me in the dress in exchange for me teaching him how to sew. He was very agreeable, and we went down to my great great uncle’s old house where we took some photos among the furniture and other items left behind (no one currently lives there). We also went down to some land my family owns on the ocean, where everything was very frozen and I had to keep my coat on until right before the photo was going to be taken! Drew shoots only on film, so even though these shots were taken in early February, they only just got developed now. Below are the ones he took outside.

This feels like a funny thing to post in June, but at its heart, it IS a summer dress even though it rose from the ashes of the Wilder gown in January! Part of the fun of film is also the delay in getting the photos back – it’s nice to see these photos now and remember that day in February where I shivered a lot and tried to look laidback while bare-armed in the snow. The delay between making and posting has also made the anguish of the grandmotherly nightgown fade from my memory a little bit!