Finished! McCalls 5791

As promised, here are some more pictures of the kiddos in their new duds. You'll have to forgive the so-so photos, they were taken with my point & shoot and despite them all being taken within an hour of each other, they were an odd combination of over & underexposed. Sigh

The dress & tie turned out beautifully, if I may say so myself. The pattern itself was quite straightforward. Which provided me opportunity to use a more challenging fabric. And challenging it was. I didn't have too much trouble with slippage (the glitter took care of that) but it frayed like crazy. I have to say, this dress was made possible by Fray Check. Thanks Dritz!!

I used this dress as an opportunity to try a couple new (to me) techniques.  I think children's clothes are a good time to practice for a couple reasons. 1) Children will likely outgrow the clothes before they fall apart. 2) The cuteness factor. Cute kids & babies make up for any shortcomings the garments may have 3) Kids are always on the move. No time to closely examine things like zippers & hems.

That being said, I inserted my very first invisible zipper on this dress and I must say, I think I prefer these over lapped & centered applications.  I can foresee, however, having troubles with bubbling at the bottom of the zipper in the future. We'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Also, french seams! The dress is fully lined, with the skirt lining being free-hanging. I love the results of the french seams & I only had to rip one out after sewing it on the right side. D'oh!

 

I also slip stitched the bodice lining to the zipper & skirt. And I'm pleased with how it turned out. I had enough confidence that I skipped the transparent thread. My consistency has improved dramatically. You can tell when looking at it when I took a break from sewing & came back to it, but all in all, it looks quite nice. My mom even told me so. 

As for the hem, I did a lot of looking at blind hemming techniques & even practiced on a few scraps of fashion fabric, but int he end I decided that it requires too much pressing and I feared scorching the dress on the very last step. On the other hand, I did not want to do the typical double turned hem. The "sportswear" finish would just not do for this little dress.

I remembered from the serger class I took last month that a delicate finish can be obtained by using a 3 thread stitch. So that's what I did. :) And I really like the results.

You can see pictures of the dress & tie unadorned (without the models) here.

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So, that's done with. 'What's next on my "To Sew" list?', you ask. Well, I'm currently working on my pencil skirt muslin for the Fun with Fitting-Skirts class over at Pattern Review. I also have another version of Simplicity 2199 cut out that needs to be sewn. And, is it terrible to admit that I've been doing some thinking about sewing for this Fall??