Vacation Challenge - Weeks 2 & 3 complete

The beautiful knit dress is finished. It hangs so softly and drapes so well. I'm proud that my first effort with this difficult fabric came out so well. Thank you, again, Sarah Veblen! I'm looking forward to wearing this on my soon-to-begin vacation, my first in 2 years. What I learned in the process of putting this dress together is that the fabric you make your test garment out of should have about the same stretch as your fashion fabric. My test fabric was not so stretchy, and I found that the dress grew a bit as I sewed it. My alterations in the back worked out well. Moving the two bodice pieces closer together got  me some more back coverage, which was exactly what I had in mind. And because I didn't add on to the outside edges what I took from the middle, it also succeeded in tightening up the dress, which really helped due to the "growth factor."
I am looking forward to sewing more with jersy single knits. Now that I know a bit more about their behavior, I'll be willing to feature them as choices for t-shirts and simple dresses for my sewing business.

Week 3 took a bit of doing.  After many hours of trying to coax my serger into making the decorative edge, I had to surrender. I will spend some time perfecting this technique after vacation. I broke down, went to the fabric store, and bought bias binding. The wrong size of bias binding! I ended up cutting my own from a lovely printed burn-out I had in the stash. It was so pretty I decided to do an exposed binding to show it off.

You can see the binding at the cuffs and bottom edge. It disappears where the lapel rolls. I couldn't quite figure out how to make a smooth transition at that point. There are a lot of fabric layers to deal with where the bottom edge of the collar turns back.

I found an issue with the pattern design when I rolled the cuffs back as the illustration shows. The seaming for the sleeve pleat shows and just looks tacky. I added rectangles of the binding fabric both to cover and to keep the sleeves turned up. There are buttons sewn on to keep the tabs in place.

My husband picked the front button out of my mom's old button box. It's probably older than I am, which makes it an antique button! The cuff buttons also came from that box and are miraculously color-coordinated.

I feel the need to digress about my mom's button box. This wonderful woman learned to sew on a treadle machine. She lived through the Great Depression and the rationing of World War II. The button box is a classic demonstration of that background. There are tons of men's shirt buttons, cut from my dad's shirts when they could no longer be repaired and went off to the rag man. Ditto for teeny-tiny buttons removed from baby clothes and doll clothes. At one point, she even tried to put them into matching sets by tying bunches together with thread. All the single buttons left over when the sewing project needed 3 buttons and the button card had sets of 2. Buttons cut from robes and coats. I think the big orange button was a robe button. Decorative buttons from sweaters and dresses went into the box. I am blessed to have this collection from my mom, but I don't hesitate to use the buttons. She would have!