Butterick B5305 - A dress for fat days!

I've managed to finish it today, Butterick B5305 is complete! I've had a few trips over the final hurdles, these were:

• My mission to find a zip foot was unsuccessful so I had to do it without. The zip looks ok but the bottom of the zip looks a bit dodgy.
• The instructions told me to put the zip on before the facing, which I did. The diagram showed the zip teeth at the top of the dress so I did that, then when I went to do the facing I realised that I would be turning it under and therefore had to turn the zip under as well! A valuable lesson to myself is to always keep the next stage in the back of my mind and think carefully about what I'm doing! I've managed to hand sew the top of the zip down so it looks fine from the outside but I'm a perfectionist and I know I've made a mistake, which annoys me!

But it's done and all in all it's been the quickest and easiest out of all the dresses I've done so far. The dress itself has a tunic shape to it which means that it's quite forgiving over my post-christmas podgy bits, it's definitely a good dress for 'fat' days! However, I can put a belt round it and make it look a bit more streamlined on other days. I think this is the first dress I've made which hasn't been incredibly long before hemming, I only turned up a 3/4 inch hem on it and it sits around knee length on my 5'4" frame so potentially could end up being quite short on taller ladies!

Here are some pics, please forgive that it needs a bit of an iron. It's far from perfect but I'm slowly learning! The hem looks a bit dodgy, I think it's just the way it's hanging on the hanger because it looks fine when it's on.

My university mirror isn't full length, but this is almost the whole dress!

 

Now I need to start thinking about what I'll do next! Maybe I'll make something that's not a dress for a change, I'll keep you updated!

More dress progress

This dress has certainly come together quickly, I haven't even had much time to work on it this week and yet I think it will still be finished by the end of the weekend, which means it'll have taken me a week and so far I've probably only spent a few hours on it in total. I suppose this is why it's considered 'very easy'!

Yesterday I managed to have some issues with the thread getting caught in the bobbin holder which meant I had to take apart the whole bobbin area in order to get it out and then try and put it back together again. Afterwards it was rattling and I couldn't work out why but today I realised that I hadn't clipped it all back in properly so problem solved! So now I've managed to attach and finish the sleeves and do the yoke (after managing to confuse myself about how it actually attached to the dress), so now I just need to go and buy the elusive zipper foot so I can sew the zip on, then just the facing and the hem to do!

I love it when a garment starts coming together and the end is in sight, here's a pic of it thus far:

   

Also, over 200 visitors and no followers :-( Clearly I need to become a better writer, or sewer... or both!