Finished pin-up dress

Last Monday I had the last sewing class before the holidays. Since I really wanted to wear my dress to a Christmas party, I was determined to put in some extra effort and finish it. But when I arrived, I saw some bottles of wine and crisps standing in the corner. Since I don’t suspect my teacher of being a sneaky alcoholic, I had an inckling we might have a small christmas party. So about an hour before class normally finishes, we all put down our projects and sat down together. This is all very nice of course, but now I couldn’t finish my dress. And I was so close! All that was left to finish was the neck, the arm holes and the hem. So I decided to do it all at home.

For the neck, I used a facing of 3 centimeters. Working around the sharp corners got a little tricky, and it wasn’t stitched perfectly everywhere, but it looked all right, and that’s the most important thing.

Next were the arm holes. As you may remember from my previous post, the dress I modelled this dress on had capped sleeves. I had already got the sleeves in, but I still needed to finish the lower seam. My teacher advised me to use a bias to prevent the arm holes stretching out. The remaining arm hole was 12 centimeters. Since it is best to calculate some extra fabric, I cut out bias that was 15×3 centimeters. Don’t forget: bias is always cut diagonally, preferably at 45° of the grain!

Once this was done, all that was left was the hem. Since the fabric has a sort of optical effect and the dress kind of looked like a moving bag when I fitted it, I decided to make it a tiny bit shorter. It ended up looking like this: