Last minute dot com dress

I firmly believe that is it our creative hobbies that can help us out during those anxious moments in our lives.

And so it was with this dress.

In a month when my work colleagues and I came to acknowledge that the company we worked for might be struggling, to the collapse of the company, the stress of uncertainty, the need to find a new job and facing attending interviews; this dress was born.

With a new job secured (it’s an employees market in the construction industry) my husband and I snatched a lastminute.com break in the sun with my dress.

The green sixties inspired cotton poplin was provided courtesy of MinervaCrafts but it wasn’t intended for this pattern.

Initially this print was intended for this dress.

But on receiving them both in the post I knew I had made the wrong choice.

So Burda7113 will wait until next month. I know exactly what fabric to order this time.

This NewLook pattern is one I’ve had in my stash for a while. It was perfect for the cotton.

However to give a little body to the frock and help it move over my shape it needed lining.

I have never lined a dress before. I searched online and discovered there was more than one way to skin a cat, so to speak.

The main differences to the methods was to machine the lining and the fabric to the zip in the early stages of construction or the more traditional/classic method of slip stitching the lining to the zip right at the end.

I found this quite simply amazing series of video tutorials on utube by a lady called Angela Kane.

She takes you all the way through constructing a lined pinafore style dress in the classic manner. I picked up so many extra tips along the way. I urge you to take a look.

And so I was ready. But not before making my  muslin. Having had a few gaping neck issues recently and also the need to take the garment in in most places, I decided to downsize from the recommended size as led by my breast measurement and possibly attempt a full breast adjustment (eek!).

As it happens the fit was near damn perfect!

Although funnily enough, using this smaller size, I still had to take this chunk out of the back and drop the neck line a little.

Muslin made, I transferred my adjustments to the pattern pieces and cut out my fabric and lining exactly the same, leaving out the neck facing pieces.

The utube video describes exactly the process I followed to put it together so I won’t go into detail suffice to say you make up the whole of the fabric dress without joining at the shoulders, including the invisible zip and the whole of the lining dress, without joining at the shoulders, without the zip. You attach one to the other at the neck and the arm holes, pull the dress the right way around and then tackle joining the shoulders. But honestly, look at the videos.

And voila! A great fitted lined frock that is such a delight to slip on and wear.

It was a pleasure to be working with cotton again. I had quite discarded cotton after my recently discovered love of stretchy fabric.

And amazingly, this dress hardly creased considering the fit and sitting for 2 hours wolfing down an Italian (meal).

I’m back in blighty now. My new job starts tomorrow. Wish me luck; I’m feeling very nervous!

Love, Lucie xx