January dress finished!

An extra post this week because I've finished Butterick 5748, my January dress for the Vintage Sew A Dress A Month challenge, and I've got something else to post on Sunday.

I finally finished all the hemming, and here is the end result. This is the dress without a petticoat, and just the stiffness of the cotton lining to hold the skirt out.

Demonstrating the added pocket!

The full lining did add to the sewing time, but as well as giving the dress some body it makes for a very neat interior.

In effect, it's two dresses sewn together

It makes the zip especially neat

One thing which I forgot to mention in earlier posts is that the dress back is lower than the front. I was worried that it might be too low on my short torso, so raised it by 2.5cm / 1", and was glad that I did. This is the end result.

Showing the scoop back

I do wish that I'd thought to pattern match the bodice back seam though!

And here is the dress worn with a belt, a net underskirt, my most 1960-ish shoes, and a matching cardigan.

The full look

The cardi was actually the start of this outfit. Because I am such a poor/super-slow knitter, I tend to get very excited when I come across knitwear specifically for petites. Hence I bought this cute bolero, and then realised that it went with absolutely nothing that I owned. So the obvious solution was to buy some suitable fabric - which then sat in my stash for a couple of years. However it finally all came together. It's not exactly a January outfit, but I can see it getting a lot of wear when the warmer weather comes.

Even though I went totally off-piste with the cutting layout, I didn't use any more fabric than the yardage given on the pattern envelope. Which brings me to. . . the Stashometer. Starting afresh felt like cheating, so I decided to carry over last year's deficit. Happily, all that lining means that the overall fabric use for this dress was quite high.

In credit!

Slow going on my January dress

I had hoped to be posting about my completed January entry for the Vintage Sew A Dress A Month today, but it's not quite finished. For some reason, hemming a circle skirt of thin viscose is harder, and takes longer, than hemming a circle skirt of cotton. Also, the dress is fully lined, so once I've finished that I've got the lining to hem as well - although that will be done by machine.

My pattern choice for January

Part of the reason why this dress is taking so long is that I made life harder for myself by altering the cutting layout. Like many of Butterick's other full-skirted pattern reissues, 5748 has the skirt cut at right angles to the bodice - along the fabric rather than across it.

Cutting layouts for different views and fabric widths

This wasn't a problem when I made Butterick 6582. The bold floral print looked much the same both up-and-down and sideways.

This fabric hides everything

The stash fabric I'm using for 5748 however is strongly directional.

This fabric does not

I didn't want to have the black elements of the pattern running up and down on the bodice, and sideways on the skirt, so I used an approach which was common in the 1950s.

This Weldons pattern is a good example, as it also has a full skirt - in this case it's a semi-circle.

Weldons 1606

Because the completed skirt sections would be wider than most fabrics available at the time, they are split into two pieces; the skirt and the skirt gore.

Instructions showing the pattern pieces

These are stitched together, and then the completed pieces are sewn up to make the skirt.

The skirt construction

I folded my fabric in half lengthways, and cut out the skirt front and back on the fold. Before I unpinned the pattern from the fabric, I marked where the edge of the fabric was, making an allowance for the seam. Then I used the pattern piece to cut out the extension. Naturally, I had to pattern match the join - I couldn't bring myself not to! And then, I decided to alternate between black and light grey thread on the join, to make sure that the stitches don't show. Talk about a glutton for punishment!

Attaching one of the skirt gores

Because the viscose is so thin, I used a thicker cotton for the lining than I'd normally use, to give the dress some body. I also had to patch one of the bust darts with a lighter section of the fabric, to stop one of the back circles from showing through. The only other changes I made were my usual ones of swapping the zip to the right side and adding a pocket in the left side skirt seam.

This is the dress as it currently looks. I'll post some pictures of me wearing it when I finally finish the hems! I'm hemming it with the light grey thread, and going over the stitches in the black sections with a black permanent laundry marker pen. I did the same on the hand-picked zip.

On Nancy, awaiting hemming