V8997: New Favourite Dress Pattern that I almost broke

Just look at this little bit of gorgeousness.

Wouldn’t you wear this if you could? You would. Unless you’re a boy, and maybe even then. It’s just fantastic, isn’t it? The bodice fit, the gored skirt with its lovely flares, the seam details on the front, the fact that it is adjustable for different cup sizes (aka no FBA required).

And yet after ordering it in the spring, it sat on my stash shelf, unloved.

Clearly this needed to be rectified while it was still warm enough to wear it.

The yellow cotton fabric came from Downtown Fabric again, Queen W in Toronto ($8/m) and I lined it with yellow cotton batiste (more expensive than the dress fabric, alas, but I got it 50% off at Fabricland) because after making a nice cotton dress for the summer heat, I was not going to add a sticky acetate lining. The interfacing is cotton fusible. More on that below.

I absolutely freaking adore this pattern. I would marry it, if it weren’t illegal in all ten provinces. I would marry it and have little paper-human children. Paper dolls. I would have paper dolls with this pattern.

I’d already made a few Vogue shirt patterns with the cup-size adjustment things so I knew I could count on 14D fitting well, and so didn’t bother to muslin. And it was just fine! Really. I cut everything out in 14D and sewed it up, and once it was all together the only change I had to make was shortening the shoulder seams by 1/4″ because the bodice is so structured and my waist is a bit high so the whole thing was sitting a bit off my shoulders. It was an easy fix (and now I know for next time, only I’ll take it off the waist). All the seams lined up; the back is flat; the waist fits; the bodice is just right; the flared skirt is fantastic. It has pockets that sit at just the right place.

It took me all weekend, mind you. Saturday and Sunday. There are a ton of pieces (44, counting dress, lining and interfacing) so that’s a lot of seams and a lot of pressing. Still, for this, it is worth it.

I was within shooting distance of finishing the dress (hemming to go, and that was it) and had it on to test the fit, and I went outside to start the BBQ for dinner. Single mom, you know. And it spattered dark soot all over the front of my dress.

So the very first thing I had to do, once the hemming was done, was stain-treat and wash my new dress. Argh. All for a moment of carelessness. Which led me to wonder what the cotton fusible interfacing would do in the wash. Are you supposed to pre-shrink that stuff? I never pre-shrink interfacing but normally I haven’t fused it to the entire upper half of a dress. Crap. Is it going to wreck my dress when I wash it to remove the soot stains?

I pre-treated. I washed. I partially dried on the low-heat setting. And 95% of the dress was just fine, but the two side-back pieces on the bodice bubbled up horribly. Fortunately ironing on a very hot setting while the fabric was still damp (at almost midnight, Dear Readers, when I had my alarm set for six–but I had to fix it!) smoothed out almost all of it. Thank god it’s still wearable. If I had killed it before I even got a chance to wear it, I probably would have held a funeral for it in the backyard. I love it that much.

The shoulders are a bit wide, so I added lingerie loops into the seams to keep them over my bra straps. Just a hook-and-eye set, with the eye sewn to the shoulder seam below the sleeve, where it’s nicely hidden, and then the hook attached to a nice long cord. (Cord was handmade: knotted on to the hook with a good long tail, then stitched it on to the inner shoulder seam, small knot, and buttonhole stitches over the thread and tail all the way up to the hook, with another knot to tie it securely, and then partially threaded through the cord to hide the knot and tail. That probably doesn’t make any sense. I should have taken a picture of the process for a visual.)

I also fussed with the back closure, above the zipper, quite a bit. I added a hook-and-eye set facing both up and down, as the pattern recommends, but it was too visible from the outside (all the hook-and-eye sets I can find around here are black). I added a button with a handmade thread closure, and then moved the button over, but it still gaped too much and I couldn’t do it up easily. Then I added a hook to one side and a thread loop to the other. It’s not perfect but it’s the best of what I’ve tried so far. Anything snugger and I can’t get it done up by myself, which is kind of important.

And yes, I know the cords are rough. I’m not sure how other people get their buttonhole stitches on thread to lie so smoothly, but I haven’t yet mastered it. Fortunately, these are hidden, so who cares? And they’re tough and will last forever.

The only thing I’m not happy with is the zipper. I should have listened to my inner voice and gone with the invisible zipper–instead I used a regular one, which was hard to sew in properly with all the many layers of fabric at the waist. So it’s clunky. I’d also widen the inner shoulders a bit so that it doesn’t sit quite so far off.

Next: the sheath version with the colour-blocking in a nice, colourful, heavy-ish wool or wool-silk. I can’t wait.