Handwoven fabric for my dress

This is the piece of handwoven cotton from Thailand I've used to make the dress I will be wearing at the fashion show tomorrow. It is 2 1/2 yards long and 25" wide. Not very much!

Here is my sketch from July and the finished dress from yesterday.

You can see below that I used every possible square inch of fabric for this dress.  If I were a larger size I would have had to make something different.

In order to get the effect I wanted with the stripes, I had to do all sorts of tricky things with the fabric.  And every time I cut the fabric it would start raveling a lot, so I had to stop and serge every cut edge.




There is a seam connecting the bottom rust colored band with the striped section.  I needed to cut into the large band of stripes to get the fabric needed for the vertical stripes for the slit.  But I still wanted rust at the bottom.

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But then since there was so little fabric left, shreds really, I had to buy something else for the inside of the hem and neck facing.  This is dark blue linen.

Here is the inside of the dress with it's silk lining. As you can see I decided to finish the armhole with bias.

To make the bias, I sewed together the shreds of fabric I had, cut them on the bias and then joined them.  The result was bias where the average length of each piece was about 2 1/2".

So this is all the fabric I have left ... REALLY. 

My Grandmother would be proud.

Oh ... I hope they let me keep this dress ... I like it so much.