Denise and I met up at my place, Simon being in Telford, the cats always take an interest in Denise’s bag, at least this week they didn’t try to fill it up by pushing things off the counter and window ledge.

Denise hung up her dress and here is the promised photo of the yoke….

This week we are starting on the sleeves, after checking the marks and the book several times we put in our rows of gathering stitches…….

Stitched up the underarm seam

Made the sleeve cuff and stitched it to the sleeve and ironed it all in place.

This is where my problems started, I stitched my sleeve in place, it went in first time which is always a bonus. I took the pins out and turned it the right way round, urk!!! There are loads of gathers across the front of the seam, I’m thinking this can’t be right! I checked the pattern pieces both the traced ones and the pattern sheet, then I double checked the markings on my fabric and the instructions in the book, everything is right, so I check Gerties picture in the front of the book no, the front of the sleeve is smooth, the top of the sleeve is nicely puffy. So in desperation I type ‘Gerties Shirtwaist dress’ into Google images, looking through the images there are an array of puffy sleeves with rather a lot of gathers across the front, looking (as Denise said) much like the cast of Oklahoma.

I’ve put my other sleeve in, not only do I not like the puffy sleeve look, the sleeve which was alright to put on when it wasn’t attached to the dress, is totally impossible to get out of on my own when stitched into the arm hole.

After Denise had prised me out of my dress, I undid all the work done that evening and am about to go back to the drawing board.

Here is a couple of photos of Denise’s dress, she also has the gathers on the front, but they aren’t quite as puffy as mine and she can also get in and out her dress without needing help.

so long for now

Hi, It has taken me a little while to get the photos sorted out for this post, out Sewalong actually happened on Tuesday and it is now Friday, life gets in the way.

I arrived at Denise’s at about 8PM, slightly later than I anticipated but in plenty of time to get loads done (We thought)We both started off by putting in the line for the first row of stitching, I used my water soluble pen, Denise used chalk…

my pen is turquoise, if you look closely you can see the line going across the middle, our first lines of stitching went in brilliantly as did the second, then disaster struck, Denise pulled her gathered stitches out straight and the elastic broke, we don’t know if she had wound her bobbin too tight or the elastic wasn’t as strong as it should have been, but she needed to unpick and start again, of course because Denise used chalk, some of it had rubbed off, once we got the first line in and the rest went on easy

The next bit we did was to attach the back yoke to the the back bodice, Gertie suggests leaving the elastic in the bobbin and using it to gather the yoke, I’m not convinced, in fact I plain didn’t like it. I did my yoke first leaving with the elastic, I found that it was hard to keep the yoke piece from curling up and the gathers weren’t any more even than if i had used the two rows of stitching method. After completing mine I suggested that Denise should do it the regular way, in my opinion it looks better. Not enough to warrant unpicking it, but if i were to make this dress again i would gather with two rows of stitching pulled up rather than the using the shirring elastic.

Back View

I don’t have a picture of Denises yoke if I remember I’ll get one next week.

we stitched each pocket piece to it’s corresponding side piece,

by this time it was getting a little late 11 o’clock so we decided to call it a day.

Denise suggested that before we meet again we stitch up our side seams and shoulders so that we are all ready for the sleeves.

I agreed with this so packed up and went home.

My friend and I are having a mini sewalong, if that is what you can call two people sewing the same pattern together.

Week one we decided on which pattern we wanted to do and traced and cut out the pattern pieces, we arranged to meet up the following week with our dresses cut out and ready to sew.

I am using this fabric

I think it is a light cotton, I bought on my trip to London in the summer.

and my friend is using this fabric

A cotton purchased from Kayes Textiles on London Road, Southend-on-Sea, my friend did have a slight issue as in the fact that although the pattern was advertised for 45 inch fabric, her skirt was too wide by about an inch, especially as she wanted it longer than the pattern.

Week two we managed to get the front pieces together, which for some reason took far longer than I thought it would, not helped by the pleats and the misleading diagrams in the book. The book seems to have the pleats going the opposite way to the photo of the dress, also after basting the pleats into the skirt there was half an inch extra fabric in my skirt but Denise’s was fine (can only assume a tracing issue on my part).

Here is what it looks like so far

because of the fabric you can’t really see the pesky pleats but they are there.

next week we tackle shirring, collars and sleeves