Dress No. 42 - Construction

Friday night after work I went out with the Significant Other and got in late Saturday morning...therefore there was no sewing here on Saturday.  Lots of sleeping and lazying around but no sewing!  Then I got a late start today.  I knew what I wanted to make, I just wasn't sure about the alterations to the pattern.  After dancing around the pattern a couple of times,  I finally settled down to work.

Let me start out by saying that the dress isn't finished.  I have the basic shell completed but the dress still needs sleeves, a lining (which I only decided upon after getting the shell done), and I may yet add a black band to the bottom of the dress.  It is still very much a work in progress.

The Ingredients

embroidered tropical wool, black wool crepe

mother of pearl flower buttons

Inspiration
I found this Out of Print (OOP) Vogue Pattern by Sandra Betzina in the collection while searching for another pattern. 

I loved this top when it came out and thought the details would work well on my TNT dress.  I didn't want the neckline but the sleeves with the band & button were very appealing.  I finally decided that I would make black colored bands at the neckline and the sleeve bands.  A search through the fabric closet yielded a medium weight black wool crepe that was the same weight as the tropical embroidered wool.

Pattern Alterations
Of course, I used my TNT dress pattern as my starting point.  The first alteration was to make the bands at the neckline on the front and back dress pieces.

front piece with yoke

back piece with yoke

My method for insuring that the plaids match...cut out the front piece and lay it on top of the fabric next to the back piece - matching the plaids to the key points on both pattern pieces.  This is similar to the single cut method but I like laying the pieces next to each other to insure that the plaids will match at the seamline.

Construction

The construction was pretty straight forward.  Each band was added to the bottom dress piece and pressed towards the band.  An invisible zipper was added to the back of the dress...

matching the plaids and the black bands

...then an embellishment was added to the neckband.  I really wanted the embellishment to be a rounded band with the button added to it...but I just couldn't get it to work.  So I cut the band down, twisted it and anchored it to the neckband with zigzagged bars and a few hand stitches.  Finally I stitched the button onto the top using a double strand of waxed thread. 

I'm liking this look and doesn't the button work well with the fabric?!  It's not quite how I imagined the dress when I started the process but it incorporates the buttons & bands from the inspiration piece. It's also unlike any dress presently in my wardrobe. 

So this is where it stands now:

I will work on it again next weekend...hopefully getting it finished, as well as, the Simplicity jacket...which now no longer works with this dress...but it will work with the pieces I made during my sewcation.

...as always, more later!