The Banana Carousel Dress - Planning

I have had the idea in my head fr this dress for a while now.  In fact since I saw this wonderful dress on Modcloth I have wanted to make my own.

Modcloth

I am not sure it is even on the site any more but I saved the picture and continually looked at it.  I love the red piping, the tabs and the carousel print.  I found a pattern pretty easily which I thought would work really well and snapped it up along with red piping and a big metal zipper as I thought about doing an exposed zipper right down the back.

New Look 6864

 The black dress and the floral one on the far right are perfect for the circle neckline and waistband I want.  Then I started to look for carousel print material.  Here I hit a massive snag.  I just could not find anything anywhere that was both carousel, or as my family call them, golden gallopers AND had the same red/yellow/beige tones as the original dress.  I knew I wouldn't find an exact match but I did want to keep the original tones of the dress. 

The nearest I could find was this on Spoonflower but it was just too costly to pay for it, pay for postage and pay customs too.  (I looked at A LOT of websites!)  I started widening my search to circus themed and found some cute Cath Kidston fabric but it was still expensive.  I then set up an ebay search to alert me if anything with 'carousel fabric' came up and up popped just under a metre of this very cute boarder print.

My lovely border print and Kona Banana

It was the right colour and had actual horses on it rather than just circus but it was a border rather than full fabric but I decided this could work and snapped it up for a couple of quid.  Then the second search began fr a main fabric which would match the border and my bright red piping.  I looked at a lot of beige and cream fabrics and considered some dobby gauze but I wasn't sure I would wear a cream dress that much as it is not a very practical colour.  I then spotted some 'apricot' fabric on ebay which I thought matched the border but when it arrived I didn't like it.  (This then got dyed purple and became my Amazing 8 Hour Christmas Dress.) 

After seeing the apricot I decided I would rather have a pale yellow main dress and browsed the Kona cottons which I had seen recommended on the blogosphere.  I found Kona Banana, fell in love and that was it!  I rarely have to put so much time and effort into finding materials for a dress so this was all quite new to me.

Now on to the sewing!