Pattern: Lady Skater dress by Kitschy Coo
Fabric: 2,38 m printed cotton knit by
Megan Blue Fabrics (strange
amount; I don’t know how much I intended to buy, but this was exactly enough!)
Haberdasheries: About 1,5 m narrow
elastic
Firsts: sewing with knit fabric, using an overlocker for garment construction, using
a twin needle
So many people have made this dress, and rightly so. It feels like a
night gown when you wear it, but it looks so elegant! An excellent combination.
I think it’s great that there’s a printing overview in the pattern! I missed
that on previous print-at-home patterns, and that caused me to print some
unneeded pages, which were actually empty for my size, or which had parts on
them that I wasn’t using. Rather a waste of paper.
To be honest, when I first started working on this dress I wasn’t too
happy with the pattern, because it seemed like I had to do so much alteration
that I felt I might as well have improvised. But then I found the problem was
just that the sizing table somehow didn’t work for me. According to my measurements,
which I double checked, my upper bust is a size 4 and my waist a size 3. So I
graded between the sizes and made a tryout bodice out of some knit fabric I had
in my stash, but even before trying it on I could tell it was too wide. It didn’t
have any negative ease at all! I had to take it in by exactly such an amount
that I realised I should just use the size 3 pattern.
The tryout bodice also showed I needed to make some alterations. It hung
too low at the front and back, so I made the bodice MUCH shorter. It’s strange that
this was necessary, as the pattern is intended for women who are quite a bit
shorter than me, but I cut 5,5 cm off the bottom of the front bodice pattern
and also made it straight rather than curved.
I made the long sleeved version, and lengthened the sleeve pattern by 5 cm.
Finally, I added 8 cm to the skirt pattern to make sure it was long enough, and
after trying the dress on, decided not to cut any of that length off again. I
folded the hem back 16 mm and hemmed it with a twin needle. This was a first,
and I liked it. It was very easy to do and gave the hems a store bought look,
which I think is a good thing. (Since I’ve started making contemporary clothes,
I have been looking at store bought clothes in more detail and noticed they are
often very inaccurately sewn. Obviously I don’t want that to be the case with
whatever I make, but I do prefer if my clothes don’t look homemade.)
This is the first time I used an overlocker for garment construction. I
used it before to finish the seams on the inside of my pyjama trousers and
jeans 1 and 2, but I sewed those together on my regular machine. But because of
the elastic seams, an overlocker is just perfect for constructing knit
garments. However, I rather struggle with mine. I watched the first lessons of
the Craftsy Beginner Serging course,
which I can really recommend. After watching I felt like I understood the
machine a lot better than I did from just reading the manual. The course also
comes with a ‘serger stitch book’ including troubleshooting list and sample
pages. Amy, the teacher, suggests making samples using four different coloured
yarns which match the four colours of the threading manual, and I found that
extremely helpful, because when something goes wrong it enables you to see
which thread is causing the problem. And writing the tensions and other
settings on the sample pages means you don’t have to remember them or discover
them all over again with each project.
Despite the excellent course, I still had overlocker problems, though.
The main one being that the machine will work perfectly the one moment, and
create stitches like these the next:
Without anything having changed! I hope I’ll understand why at some
point, because the randomness of this drives me up the wall.
I didn’t use clear elastic, as I read on some blog that regular elastic
also worked fine, and clear elastic seems like the kind of material that
contains harmful chemicals. I didn’t put any elastic in the shoulder seams, as
none of my store bought jersey shirts have that, and the shoulders never sag –
why would they?
I think I pattern matched the neckline band quite nicely, but I forgot
to try to pattern match the skirt seams! One of them ended up almost perfectly
matched, after all, but the other did not :P. The bodice and skirt also don’t
match because I cut the aforementioned length off the bodice, but I think I’ll
probably only wear the dress with my bow belt or a
cardi over it, so that doesn’t really bother me.
This is my first Lady Skater dress – and I’m sure many more will follow!
I’m currently shopping for more knit fabrics, which is something entirely new
to me! As they are unusable for historical projects, I always used to look
right past them!
