sorry for the delay in posting the results of week 4, I spent Wednesday evening alternating between being hot and cold and then went down with other flu type symptoms, not conducive to sitting down and concentrating on blog posts.

We managed to get the collar and the facings though not without some issues, mainly with not marking pattern pieces up correctly. I cannot stress enough if you are using this pattern book, check and double check all tracings and mark the T s from the pattern to your fabric.

Denise’s waist matched between the facing seam and the dress front seam, mine was about and inch and a half out, obviously my skirt facing was going to be too long as I hadn’t shortened it to match my shortened skirt pieces.

I lined up my collar with the centre of the back seam and centre of the collar, I also lined up my collar notches with the notches on the front of the dress. It seemed to go on all right we both had a couple of issues with a fold in the fabric round the collar but other wise pretty painless, as it was about 10:30 by this time we decided that we would do the slip stitching during the week so that all we had left was the button holes and hemming.

I wasn’t totally happy with the way my back facing was sitting but I figured that it just needed trimming and snipping, it wasn’t until the weekend just gone, once I felt up to wrestling with my dress that I put it on my dress form to look at it properly.

The first thing I noticed was that the pleats were wrong on one side of the dress, the pleats were all facing the same way doh!!! so I unpicked that part of the waist seam and folded them the way they should go. The second thing I noticed was that the collar wouldn’t lay flat.

I started trimming away the excess fabric which was when I discovered I’d somehow managed to catch part of the collar which I shouldn’t have when stitching on the facings and added to that there was a large fold of facing fabric where it should have been flat. I undid the iffy bits of the neck line and put it back in again, trimmed it all up and snipped the edges.

the collar lay nice and flat now, unfortunately it wasn’t symmetrical, the collar was noticeably off centre boo!!!

I took the whole collar off checked the marks they all lined up, the collar was still off, in the end I ignored the marks and used my tape measure. Here are the picture of how it look now, unfortunately I forgot to take any before pictures.

This weeks sewalong (10th)had to be put off as we were both not well, but hopefully the dresses will be finished next week.