clara

Otherwise known as “The Octopod Dress.”

I bought the fabric and notions for this at Brooklyn General right before I started working there (Cotton + Steel Mystery Food Cotton Lawn with brass buttons). It’s something of a joke that all the staff there purchased some of this fabric, so that the first bolt sold out before the customers even got to see it. 🙂 My plan was to make this dress (Sew Liberated’s Clara Dress) from the beginning, but it took me ages to cut into it. I tend to be a little precious about my fabrics, and I worry a lot about fit. But after some careful measuring of tissue, reassuring myself the the elastic in the waist would cover a lot of sins, and a few deeps breaths, I jumped in.

And now, shirtwaist dress! With keyhole sleeves! And…wait for it…OCTOPODS!

It was a pretty simple deal to put together, really. After doing up another Violet with the no-facings hack (which I just realized I never blogged…oy), I was prepared for the placket construction, and that was really the only tricky bit. I did a few things differently than the pattern recommended… namely NOT hand-stitching down the collar binding (since the collar covers the edgestitching anyway) and only running elastic around the back (since the fronts matched up pretty well, and who wants gathers around the waist if you don’t really need them?). If I were to do it again, I would definitely have interfaced the plackets (mine tunneled a bit with the buttonholes and buttons), and I would have set in the sleeves before sewing the side seams to avoid puckering.

To date, this is the thing I’ve made that’s garnered the most “You MADE that?” responses. 🙂 And, it’s the first finished member of my Fall/Winter Wardrobe Architect challenge. WOOHOO! 1 down, 12 to go!