At the beginning of the month I was in this dress class at Gather Here: the Hazel Dress. The Hazel dress is a wide strapped dress with a fitted bodice, a gathered skirt and an invisible zipper. Now I'm not super good at the sewing. Lack of practice means lack of skill don't you know. But in 2 sessions, Virginia was able to coax a respectable dress out of me. It was fun to make and fun to wear and I will be making another one. (with something funky for the bodice).
(Yes, my hair is wet out of the shower. When your hair is this short there is no point in doing too much. Just a little gel or spray wax to spike it up a bit.)
The Hazel Dress is a Colinette dress pattern and I have to admit that I loved the format. The little booklet was a lot of fun, almost like reading a magazine, which is good when you feel a bit intimidated.
The first step was to cut out the pattern pieces and transfer them to Pattern Ease. Now, Pattern Ease is this thick paper-like material that is woven or extruded or something in a way that it doesn't mess with scissors like normal paper. It is also much sturdier than the tissue paper this is my bane for most commercial patterns. So, we cut around the pattern pieces at the largest size (and not cut out, just cut around) and then transferred our size to the Pattern Ease. Now, I am a rectangle. Almost no indentation at my waist and certainly not as much as the pattern required, so we graded the bodice so that the bottom would fit with a different skirt size.
Grading is kind of fun and kind of, well, terrifiying. If you don't love sewing then the idea that you don't know how it will turn out is a bit freaky, so we sewed a muslin of the bodice. My bodice came out perfect in the muslin (the grading worked), but others had to make adjustments there.
That was the first session.
Between sessions we were to cut out the dress fabric, sew the bodice, sew the straps, and sew the skirt. Attaching the sections, gathering the skirt, adding the zipper and hemming were all part of the second session.
My husband was away that weekend and it was hot! So, I mostly worked on my dress in the day before and the morning of the class.
This dress is awesome, because it has gloriously roomy pockets. However, my markings (or lack of markings) meant that one of my pockets was off and I ended up doing a lot of seam ripping. I also flubbed the bodice because I somehow had set my needle so it wasn't in the middle and had consistent 1/2 seams. Darn!
Despite those issues, I did end up leaving the class with a finished dress that fit, looked cool and was really wearable. However, for work I wanted to hide my back tattoo, so I plopped on my sweater (which I'm not sure I ever blogged about) that I finished before Squam. Cria is made out of the Riveting yarn, recycled denim, and is a great match for the dress!
