Cranberry Knit Dress

First off, I finished my ginger jeans! I'm very excited to have tackled that project. I posted quite a few pics on instagram (find me at "soisewedthis" and you can view lots of other great ginger jeans by looking under #gingerjeans) but I'm hoping to get a few slightly better pictures taken before writing up a blog post.

The sewing project I finished prior to my gingers is this cranberry lady skater-ish dress. I decided it's "cranberry" because I wore it to Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe the color is a little more cran-grape... Either way it was stretchy and not restrictive as far as eating large amounts of food, which is why I picked to wear it.

This is the softest bamboo knit fabric and it washes amazingly well. Yay for a fabric splurge that pays off. On the other side, it was so drapey that I decided it wanted to be a gathered skirt rather than the original A-line of the lady skater pattern. This time rather than just doing a big gathered rectangle, I slashed and spread the A-line skirt pattern piece out to make it wider so that I could gather it. I think the gathered A-line makes a prettier shape than a gathered rectangle, so I will stick with this method for the future.

I had been having issues with the sleeves and armscye of the lady skater pattern. On my first (blue) lady skater I had to hack them down after I had the dress nearly finished. On my second (leopard) I went down several sizes in the sleeves, but also ended up making it too tight in the bust. So this time I hit the books and the internet and tried to learn more about fitting sleeves and sleeve drafting. I decided to redraft the bodice and sleeve pieces, making changes based on what I had read and also drawing from the shapes of a store bought knit top that fits well. Ok in the end I basically just ended up tracing it, he he. And it worked wonderfully. Tracing garments that already fit for the win!

I also made the waistline go straight across this time, as I had seen someone else do to theirs. (Thanks!) And the neckline on this one was a happy accident. I was going to do the binding method that Megan Nielsen wrote a nice tutorial for awhile back, but my band was too wide and then I wasn't getting an even line of stitching. So I started hand stitching it down invisibly, but that was driving me nuts. My hand stitching is never even and it wasn't at all invisible! so I cut the band off. but I left the serged part around the neckline and noticed that that created enough stability that I could turn it under and topstitch it down. it looks really nice and clean, but it's not at all what I had planned on doing. This time improvising worked out.