With the New Year at hand, I felt that I had neglected my sewing long enough. It was time to put my sewing machines in action other than for home dec projects and decided a dress was in order. I love to wear dresses & skirts during the winter because it allows me to sport my boots and wear my full length faux sherling that is perfect for dress & skirt wearing. (Wearing pants with that coat is totally cumbersome due to the bulkiness & length of it.)
Also, I had received Chadwicks Fall catalog some time ago and fell in love with a few of its dresses, two in particular were the Colorblock dress and the Shapely Dress.
As always I gravitate to Butterick's Lifestyle Wardrobe patterns, and I've managed to purchase several of the patterns from that collection despite them being OPPs. For my inspiration dress, I used Butterick 5146, which consists of dress, tunic, jacket, camisole, skirt, pants, & belt.
I made a jumper from that pattern 2 years ago and the outcome involved a lot of laughter. I'd paired it with a ruffle blouse and my daughter said I looked like Madam Lancelot.
Madam Lancelot Jumper...LoL
For my inspiration dress I used a medium-weight print knit from Sav-a-thon. The dress also involved a bit of fiddling. I had added darts to the front & back to take away the shapelessness of it, but after basting the dress together noticed the darts were too high and had to re-mark them.
Then there was the issue of removing excess from the side seams. When I cut this dress I'd added an 1/2" to each piece due to all the holiday eating, but then couldn't understand why the dress was too big. In thinking back when I made the jumper and of course remembered too late, that pattern was a size 16 and I had only made adjustments to the dress instead of the pattern pieces too. Finally, realized that if I gone with the pattern pieces as is I would have avoided the heartache of removing so much fabric from the seams.
Lastly the sleeves, had to reduce the circumference to closely resemble my inspiration dresses and used a sleeve pattern piece from a blouse as a template. Unlike my first take on this dress, this time I used the facings. All the seams were serged and in keeping with the colorblock dress, I added a block of color to the hem line using blanket binding. The hem line is off a bit, when I sewed the blanket binding I failed to pay close attention to line of print, but as always, its not a deal breaker.
My daughter really likes the dress and stated that I had a chic retro look going on...
I quickly showed her a pic of the dress from 2 years ago and of course not the silent type, she stated that at least I didn't look like a Pirate of the Caribbean...lol
