M5024 Shirt dress

There are an awful lot of very nice new shirt dress patterns out there, but this one has been sitting in the pattern drawer for quite a few years, and I thought that it just might be time for it to see the light of day. 

It hung around the sewing room for a few weeks minus buttonholes and buttons, and I needed an “occasion” to get it finished and worn.  So I decided that Sunday’s lunch at church (which means that I spend hours in the kitchen) was the occasion.  I got up early and managed to finish it all up in plenty of time to wear.  As should have been expected, in fairly short order my skirt was sporting olive oil stains.  Oh well.  I’m good at laundry.

I do like this dress – the style, that is.  I think I’m even happy with the fit. (Made a SBA and lengthened the skirt.)  The fabric – well … not so sure.  The label said 100% cotton.  My fingers said poly.  At the point where the price dropped substantially, I decided to take the risk.  After prewashing (a definite lack of cotton-like wrinkles) and ironing, and even after cutting out the dress, something about the fabric just didn’t feel “cotton”.  I finally decided to burn some threads.  Now this is a chambray-type fabric.  White threads going one way and blue threads going across.  First I burned the blue thread.  Definitely cotton.  I was beginning to doubt my touchy-feely fabric sense.  I had noticed that the selvage edge felt prickly.  Odd.  Then I decided that I would burn the white threads, to see what the results would be.  Definitely not cotton.  There was a definite hard little nob at the end of the thread.  Most definitely polyester.  I still persevered.  I liked   the denimy colour, the little splatters of colour.  There were a few small hiccups in the sewing, but I overcame those.  It’s not as though I don’t have polyester in my wardrobe.  After lunch clean-up, I came home and my daughter decided that pictures needed to be taken, despite the wrinkles that the dress had acquired.  Her reasoning – we’d have to wait for some time before the dress was worn again. (Now I’m not so sure that taking pictures of an exhausted me is such a good idea.  Posture was abominable, and I looked mean.)  

Pictures taken, I went off to change, and only after I had taken off the dress, did I realize just how much heat that fabric retained.  The weather wasn’t as hot and humid as I’d thought – it was the dress that made me feel that way.  And then I noticed the back …   See what happened to the back darts? 

back dart ouchy

The fabric pulled away from the stitching.  I’m a little upset.  The fit is not tight.  I should be able to lift and move and do whatever I need to do in a dress of this sort without worrying that I’ll ruin it.  Especially when the fabric is supposedly 100% cotton.

Does anyone have any brilliant ideas of how to fix this problem?  I’ll still wear the dress at home (though not when the weather is hot and humid).  The ¾ sleeves do not exactly make it cardigan-friendly, so I can’t always cover up the back.  May-be I just have to take note and only wear knits to the church kitchen??

The insides show my latest bit of craziness.  I seem to have acquired a collection of serger threads in colours that I normally do not sew.  I reasoned that if I can use crazy fabrics to make Hong Kong finishes on the insides of garments, then I can use any colour thread to serge my seams.  There are red spots on the fabric, so why not red thread on the insides??

I’m not the only one who’s recently used this OOP pattern – check out the lovely version on Frogs in a Bucket.   I saw this blog post once my dress was well under way.  I swear this time I am not being a copycat.