Class samples IV

Moving right along ...
For the Sewing Workshop (Advanced) I decided to show a dress.  One piece to hang up - easy in many respects.  I decided on McCall's 5847 - in linen.

Blue threads going one way, yellow threads going the other way - overall effect - greenish.  I've had this fabric for a few years - a "find" in the clearance section.  Oddly enough, while it was stashed away, I kept thinking of it as being bright turquoise, which it is not.  A few tweaks were needed to make it fit, like a SBA, and I also narrowed the sleeve.  Didn't make the pocket flaps, mainly because I chickened out of extra buttonholes.  I am such a chicken when it comes to buttonholes.  That wasn't always the case.  I'm still dependent on my Platinum for making buttonholes, since the buttonhole foot for my "new" Bernina has not yet arrived.  The Platinum has it's quirks, and getting hung up on buttonholes is one of them.  Eight buttonholes marching down the front of the dress were almost enough to make me crazy.  I persevered.  I used Jane's tip from a while back on using washaway stabilizer when making buttonholes.  I even remembered to breath, at least in between buttonholes.  All went well.  No buttonholes needed to be ripped out.

There is an awful lot of stitching on this dress.  I even ran out of bobbing thread at one point - something that doesn't happen very often.  Princess seams - every one of them topstitched in double rows.  I could have made lapped seams, but I didn't.  I wanted to get this done as quickly as possible, so I simply serged and topstitched.  Oh, except for the sleeve seam, which I did lap, but that's because the sleeves needed to be rolled and the wrong side shows, and heaven forbid should something ugly show from the wrong side.  I used organza for interfacing.  Didn't want to fuse anything to this lovely linen, and it seemed to work well.
I made the belt, which looks somehow much brighter in the picture than in real life - a bit of an afterthought, but without the belt, the dress is somewhat shapeless, and I really didn't want a plain sash - at least not in this fabric.
I do think that I'll make another version of this at some point - perhaps a sleeveless, shorter version.