Stitch on the Line: A New Dress for Easter, NEW LOOK K6184

Easter is my favourite celebration of the year. Yesterday we enjoyed a family fun day with bouncy castles and an Easter egg hunt and today we have sung our praises to God and had lunch with friends at church. I think that such a great time deserves a new dress!

There are so many things about this dress that I love that I can excuse its imperfections. I wonder whether I would be quite so critical of a RTW dress and I certainly wouldn't have complained if someone else had made this dress for me, I would have been delighted. So I am not going to be too hard on myself.

First of all I just loved the fabric. It makes me think of a greenhouse full of exotic flowers. There was almost 1.5 metres so I took a risk buying it and the style of the dress was dictated in the end by the small amount of fabric that I had. I already had NEW LOOK K6184 in my pattern collection and the narrow skirt version needed 1.2 metres at 150cm wide. I believe that this pattern was given away with the April 2015 issue of Sew Magazine although I bought mine in a batch from eBay. There were several reviews of the pattern on other blogs and the consensus seemed to be that the waist was a bit tight.

I rather rashly made a size 12, thinking that this was a stretch fabric and I wanted a close fitting dress. It is rather tight on the waist, which I really should have expected, but it reminds me that I would like to be slimmer and that a bit more exercise wouldn't do any harm at all.

I used more traditional sewing techniques to make this dress. For the seams I used a small zigzag stitch. This jersey knit is very stable and doesn't need any neatening.
I took up the hem using the blind hem stitch on my machine, I don't know whether you can see the stitches in this picture but the hem is finished with a zigzag while the needle also picks up small, even stitches from the main skirt just like a hand finished hem.

The internal neck facings are interfaced and edged with a simple zigzag stitch. I understitched the facings 2/8 inch from the seam but as this is a rather springy jersey the pleats at the neck still don't lie very flat and the facing is inclined to roll out a bit. I think I just about got away with this but a woven fabric would have suited this design feature better.

I finished the armholes with some commercial satin bias binding that I had left over from a previous project.

I was quite pleased with the invisible zip. It is invisible, but its bulges slightly. This doesn't matter too much, except on very hot days, because I will usually wear a jacket or cardigan with a sleeveless dress and that will cover up the back. I still need to attach a hook and loop at the top of the zip and will do this one evening when I want to stay awake watching TV.