Simplicity 2444 Modeled: My Easter Dress

It is sunny and warm here today, so I wore my new dress to church and then convinced James to take some pictures when we got home. As you can see, I added a little lace collar to the neckline. I got a whole bag of lace extras from Leah a little while back, and I decided this would be the perfect dress to liven up with a bit of lace.

Here's a shot of the front where I'm not being silly and my hands aren't in my pockets so you can see that the skirt does, in fact, hang correctly.

I need to make a few small adjustments still. I had tried to fix the gapping of the front neckline by putting in two small darts. While that fixed the neckline itself, I still have too much fabric across the top of my chest, a few inches below the neckline. So I will have to mess with my darts to fix that.

The little bit of wrinkling at the small of my back seems to be caused by the fact that I need to take the waist in a tad and I had cinched my belt tight, causing some fabric puckering.

I think the lightweight poplin worked perfectly for this dress because it gives a bit of body to the skirt.

A few detail shots:

-- lace Peter Pan collar (you can kind of see the excess fabric just below the neckline in this shot)

-- hand-picked zipper

-- seam-lace finished hem

This was not a complicated dress, and I may end up making it again. If I do, I'll try to fix my last little fitting issues with the pattern before cutting out the fabric.

Oh, and remember this dress?

Well, I spent a bit of time fixing the fitting issues with this one a few weekends ago and am much happier with it now. I actually wore it to work recently! I took in the waist at the side seams, and that helped a bunch. But I also put in a dart right at the point of the V on the neckline, and put in a decent-sized dart on each side of the back neckline to pull it all in. The fit is much improved.

Pardon the wrinkles, I haven't ironed it since I wore it to work, and the linen/rayon blend wrinkles really easily.

I'm finally happy with this version of New Look 6643, but I spent so much time trying to get the fit right by redrafting a smaller size, resizing and fixing seams, etc, etc, etc, that I think I'm done with that pattern. I have a couple of other patterns for a sheath dress, so there's no need to deal with the headache that is this pattern. I definitely learned a good lesson with this one though --- don't bother buying a pattern if the smallest size is too large and you can find the same silhouette with better sizing from another brand.

I'm not sure what I will work on next. Maybe a skirt, maybe I'll try to fix the fitting issues on the vintage-pattern dress I started, maybe I will work on another sun dress. I guess it will be a surprise for me too!