Sunday 1 May 2011

Butterick 4443. Part 4 and Done!

Phew, this dress is finished.  It took longer than anticipated due to Easter, London, Wedding, BBQs and life in general!
Okay, so where did we get to?  Oh yes, the corselette was finished and so was the dress and the lining.  The three sections just needed to come together.

Here's the dress and lining together, wrong sides together and pinned at the top edge.
Spot the mistake?  Yup, I put the netting on the wrong side of the lining.  It's very soft net so I'm going to leave it as is.  If it causes me a problem I'll re do it at a later date.

 For the hem, I used the 2" strip I removed from the lining at the hem and stitched it to the skirt.  It's a light hankerchief lawn and perfect for a faced hem.  As you can see I finished and pinked the edge as I had black thread in the overlocker and couldn't face re-threading it.....

Corselette now pinned to the top edge

Just another view.  On the Ironing Board waiting for the next step.
The next step is to finish the top edge with a bias strip.  I cut mine 2.5cms longer than the measurement of the dress top edge and 10cms deep.

Just in case you didn't know what a bias piece looks like!!
 I then sew the corselette to the dress, using 1.3cm seam allowance and a small zigzag stitch, stretching the powernet slightly to fit.  Then I stitch the bias strip, and again I use a small zigzag stitch.  I then TRIM as much of the seam allowances as I can as there are a fair few layers at this stage!  Once that's done, give it a good press and then understitch.  Press again and you're done!  Just trim the ends of the bias so they come just past the dress closure and I prick stitch them down

Here's a view looking from the top, down into the dress.


And here it is on Vivienne, the corselette is done up (as far as I can on the stand)
and zip left open so you can see the insides.
 There's no picture of me wearing this dress at the moment, Ian's busy building a wall at the front of the house so I didn't want to disturb him whilst he's in the swing of things!  As soon as I get change I'll get some photos taken, in the meantime here it is on Vivienne. 


I will be making a little belt for this dress too - but I've had enough for today.

Enjoy the rest of your Bank Holiday weekend everyone in the UK!

4 comments:

Karin said...

Oh wow! It's really neat to see how you added the corsellette to the dress. Thanks :-)

sew vala said...

That is a very beautiful dress, just love the print, xx

Michelle said...

My dress form is named Vivian as well. Love the corselette, I think I'm going to have to try this on some of the dresses I'm about to make for upcoming weddings. Looks fab!

Din said...

This is EXACTLY what I've been looking for. Gorgeous work. I made the same dress, but just added a lot of boning to the lining layer. I like the idea of powernet better though.