Lacy skater

Pattern: Lady Skater dress by Kitschy Coo

Fabric: 3 m rayon or cotton/rayon knit

Haberdasheries: none!

So, when I didn’t have any trouble using my overlocker for my KittySkater shirt, I thought: this is going so well, let’s carry on with the next Lady Skater dress straight away! And as soon as I put this fabric under the machine, it started skipping stitches like mad, and driving me crazy as before. WHY?!

I wanted to take this dress on holiday with me so I was determined to finish it quickly, but don’t ask what it looked like on the inside… Or well, I’ll show you:

The only reason I got away with this and could actually wear the dress, is that the lace design hides the gaps in the seams. I have now fixed those by zigzagging the missing bits on my regular sewing machine.

I’ve got a lace print shirt I really like, so I was looking for a lace print fabric for a Lady Skater dress and found this:

I was happy to find something so close to what I was looking for (that doesn’t often happen!) but I didn’t like the border, as I think it looks too different from the rest of the print. So I bought three metres and hoped that would be enough to avoid using the border. When I came home I realised that unless I wanted a black lace band running down my front and back, I’d actually have to cut the fabric perpendicular to its grain! I had no idea whether that would be acceptable (the dress might start stretching too much lengthwise after repeated wearing), but as it had similar amounts of stretch in both directions, and I didn’t like the vertical print option, I just went for it.

Pattern matching this was a bit of a nightmare as all the lace patterns had different widths and their centres didn’t line up, but I think I did a nice job!