New Dress!

Well, finally finished an outfit.  This is from Vogue pattern # 8701, and I made the dress and the jacket from the pattern assortment included in the envelope.  Previously, I had included some in-progress pictures in the 365 project that ultimately failed.  Here is a couple links to those:  fabric, cut out pieces, jacket body progress, sleeve and lapels, and lining progress.

 Overall, it went together well, although I'm not entirely happy with the lay of the lapels, but that could be due to the fact that the whole jacket is done in bottom-weight fabric, and so all those seams are conspiring against it laying completely flat.  Oh, well.  Such is life, and I'll remember to avoid making a jacket with sooo many seams out of heavy twill!  The dress was quite quick to sew, but there was a small problem with the instructions for lining the cap sleeves.  There was no way known to physics to be able to turn those pieces right side out again following the directions, so just wound up taking the underarm seam out, turning it and sewing them back together again before attaching the sleeve.  Small problem, but quite annoying.  One nice thing about the skirt, though, is that I got to use my mother's new serger that she received for Christmas this year.  I serged all the edges of the skirt before I sewed the pieces together so I could avoid having to french seam or sew bias binding on them to keep the fraying away.  Also, it made it easy to hem the skirt.  A simple running catch stitch sufficed, and made it possible to only turn the seam once instead of twice to avoid too much bulk.  The lining was just turned twice and machine sewed.  Yah, yah, I'm lazy.  Sue me. 

Anyway, enough chattering by me, here are the finished pictures (after church, so I'm a little wrinkled, sorry folks).