Coral Poppy Sundress

That's a break room napkin. Necessity, invention, etc.

Last Sunday (or so, I don't quite remember) I finally started cutting out pieces for the sundress I've been planning since...uh...earlier. The trip I want it for starts very extremely soon, and I foresee some finishing work while in transit. These things happen. At least for this one I have:
a) a plan (and a semi-fitted pattern!)
b) more than 36 hours
c) a sewing machine

I moved the curve at the center back seam to the side seam. No idea how that'll work in the end, but fingers crossed.

When I fitted the pattern, I ended up pinching out a significant dart at center front and making a curved back seam to get the fit smoother. The center dart I left in place—the upper bodice will be gathered down along the center line anyway, so the unmatched pattern won't be jarring—but rather than wrestling with curved button bands, I moved the back curve to the side seam edges of the back pieces. With luck, that will work out for me.

It's hard to see in the photo, but there are eight gores in the skirt, arranged evenly around the waist circumference. I'll be adding pockets and shoulder straps, too, but those didn't make the layout photo.

Taken after I learned that one should not get too excited about pressing plissé, lest one press out all the delightful texture. Who knew?

Skirt seams are all flat-felled and topstitched (by machine! it's so fast! I feel like a mid-nineteenth-century farmer discovering the wonders of a mechanized world for the first time, after saving egg money for years to be able to purchase such a clever device as a machine for sewing).

Pressing and pinning the seams was A Pain, though. Plissé is springy and spongy in unexpected ways, and my pinning habits are tuned to handsewing...which is to say, I use relatively few and widely-spaced pins, expecting to be able to fiddle with and correct any fabric wriggles as I stitch. That doesn't really happen when you're using a machine. At least, not on your first-ever project using one.

Scraps are a great source of lazy bias tape.

Because I'm frugal to a fault (and way, way past it), I used the scrap triangles from cutting the skirt gores to make a bit of bias binding for the top edge of the bodice. Clearly, I wasn't too concerned about getting a true 45° bias. This fabric has plenty of give at a slight angle to ease around the shallow corners on the bodice.

At last, a photo that shows the true obnoxious saturation of this fabric—that's the back you've been looking at this whole time.

In fact, if anything, I was wrestling the binding to stretch less as I stitched it on. For the most part, it behaved, and I'm very glad I didn't succumb to the temptation to stitch both edges down in the same pass. Maybe a more experienced seamstress could do it, but I was having plenty of fun learning about shoving ever-more-significant portions of a garment through the space between the needle and the rest of the sewing machine.

With my usual seat-of-the-pants aplomb, plotting the scalloped hem.

Those scallops are freehanded, and they are not remotely identical. Fraternal is stretching it, to be totally honest.

"But Sabine, did you not want a sort of fifties-inspired style to this dress? Does that not imply a certain amount of planning and careful measurement?"  

No, why would you think that?

Um, yes, actually, it does, and this photo was taken before I realized that I'd marked my scallops so they fell off the existing hem of the dress, rather than being cut out of it. I fixed that, with a certain amount of swearing, and proceeded to cut a vast number of little scallops out of both hem and extra fabric for facing them. Still didn't really measure them. Still not bothered about it.

Note the increased pin density.

And then I tackled the idea of inserting pockets, which I knew I wanted and I also knew I did not want to make by applying patches. Patch pockets are adorable and often practical, but there is great joy in having secret hidden pockets you can show off to your friends who naturally believe there are none in your dress because the garment industry is collectively a rat bastard.

You may have noticed this photo is not of a pocket (it's the top bodice binding). That's because pockets, too, are A Rat Bastard, and between it being late and attempting to finish each step as the sense of the instructions trickled through the fevered corners of my brain like superfine sand, I did not pause for photos of any portion of that process. Suffice to say you cut pockety shapes, stitch them in reasonable locations for pocketses, attach them to each other so you don't just have random pockety shapes hanging out in slits in your skirt, try them, discover you've made pockets that will hold approximately zero things because they're too shallow, and stitch up an extra few inches of side seam to correct the problem.

Some of those steps might be optional. I wouldn't know. These are only my third set of pockets ever. (And now "pocket" looks like a fake word to you, too.)

Nearly constructed! The shape is much better with the center front of the bodice cinched down.

The straps are just strips of fabric laid in place there—they still need to be stitched and attached. And it still needs buttons. And we're not thinking about the hem which is now approximately three times longer than it would have been were it a straight hem (dang, why couldn't a similar law apply to me? I could do with being able to reach the top shelf in the kitchen).

However, it's very satisfying to have proof that this really does look like a sundress, and it ought to fit well (final judgement reserved for after inserting buttons), and the skirt is nice and full. Also note that it is Not Teal, unlike 64% of my wardrobe, and Neither Is It Black (21% of the wardrobe).

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