Hello Internet Friends!

It’s been a while but life has been a bit topsy turvy lol those who follow me on instagram @beccamadethat will know that we recently bought our first home! So life has been busy with all things house buying and moving. We are finally settled in and I’m super excited to show off my very first sewing making in my new home! 

This was very much a last min sew (cut and sewn in 2 days!) just in time for the FluffyBlondeMonster’s work Christmas function (crazy to think that this is the first Christmas party I’ve been to in 2 years! And it was fun even with all the Covid restrictions). My new sewing space isn’t quite set up yet but hopefully over the holidays I’ll be able to finish setting it up and share a new sewing space tour with you all! 

For this dress I went with the StyleArc Belle Woven Dress, cut in a straight size 12 with the only modifications being shortening the dress length by 4” and shortening the sleeve by 1”. I did make a quick muslin of the bodice but didn’t bother making the back ruching part which I think was a mistake as if I had Likely would have shortened the V neck a tad as the ruching pulled the waistband tighter than I had assume when I was fitting the muslin. 

The fabric is a lovely viscose from Dressew with beautiful drape while still being nice an opaque. Even though I ironed this fabric on a low setting I still had some diamond marks come though on the fabric from my ironing board, I think I need a new ironing board cover as the padding on the one I have has gotten quite thin which probably lead to the transfer of marks. That being said the pattern actually looks kind of cool on the fabric and a lot of people thought it was a feature of the fabric so I got lucky lol. 

I LOVE the sleeves on this dress and they were so easy to make! It’s just 3 lines of shirring made with elastic thread and they add such a nice detail! Also, since I sewed this myself I could make sure that the tension on the elastic thread wasn’t too high, I remember having marks on my arms from similar sleeved tops in the 90’s from the shirring being too tight. Speaking of shirring, the back waist band adds a lot of nice shaping to the back of the dress along with keeping it from feeling too restricting on the front waistband. However, if I was to make this dress again, I think I would sew together the entire back (blouse, waistband, and skirt) prior to sewing in the elastic thread to make the shirring, contrary to the instructions. Having the shirring done first made it kind of difficult to pin out the waistband when it was attached to the back bodice and skirt. It also made it difficult to serger the sewn seams, so I would highly recommend adding that elastic last. OH! And using a walking foot when sewing the elastic thread was a godsend! I had previously tried elastic thread before and got pretty frustrated with it but the walking foot made it super easy to make sure the lines were straight (got that tip from this Seamwork article!) 

Over all I really like the style and ‘flair’ of this dress! The one thing i’m no so stoked about is the waistband buttons. I had noticed on the pattern that the buttonholes on the waist band were set closer to the edge of the waistband than on the skirt of the dress. I thought this was weird as then the 3 waistband buttons wouldn’t line up with the skirt so I moved them to align with the skirt. This lead to some puckering of the button band which I don’t like, so it seems that putting the button holes closer to the edge was more of a functional than ascetic choice. So if I was to make this again I would for sure use the recommended button placement even though it would mean that the waistband buttons wouldn’t line up. I may still go in and move the buttons themselves to be closer to the edge just to help a bit with the puckering but I don’t know if it will do much. I also added two snaps, one at the bottom of the V neck (to help hide my bra) and the second at the top of the skirt as there was a bit of gaping there, these were mostly for piece of mind in case one of the waist band buttons decided to unbutton itself. 

t was really nice to get back to sewing (even though it was sewing with a deadline!) and really nice to sew a bit of #SewingFrosting since with all the things going on in the world right now sewing a party dress hasn’t been high on my list of things to sew in the past 2 years lol. Hope you all are having a lovely holiday season and hopefully I’ll be able to get one more post or two out before the end of the year!