#awae dress
Making Anne’s Green Dress from Anne With An E - Part 5 (final)
First of all, before I start to talk about the dress I would like to say thank you to all of you who are following this blog. I just saw that I hit a thousand (a whole thousand!!) followers and I am soo excited and glad that there are people out there who share the same passion as me or just find it interesting! When I made this blog back in March or April I honestly expected to be shouting (or writing) into the void but it’s been so amazing to actually have the feeling to have something interesting to tell. So, the biggest thank you to all of you!!
Now, before I get too sappy, let’s move on to the dress.
I left off still not having finished the sleeves and having to finish all the seams. I thought it wasn’t going to be a lot of work, but I tend to severely underestimate the final parts of my projects.
So, first things first, I tried to attach the embroidered part of the sleeve to the upper puffy part and it took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out why it wasn’t working and what I was doing wrong. So the thing is, the circumference of the embroidered sleeve is smaller than the puffy sleeve, which I did on purpose to add some nice pleats to the stiped fabric. But I couldn’t get the exact measurment right while the sleeve was round, so I needed to reopen almost an entire seam so I could make the striped sleeve lie flat in order to add some pleats so I could then put the embroidered sleeve on top and attach them. Then I could close that opened seam back up and I was left with the top part finished and the bottom part opened because I was going to add hooks and eyes to close it later (spoiler: I ended up just stitching it shut in the end). Then I attached the embroidered collar; I tried machine stitching it first but because I wanted a very small seam at the bottom some of the fabric from the dress must’ve slipped away and it made a mess so I ended up doing it by hand.
Then it was time for the back seams and the buttons! For the back seams I just folded the edge in once and I plan on cleaning that seam up at some point in the future but for now I just needed a clean edge to work with. Then I did the front buttons. I had some small buttons left over from a skirt I made once so instead of buying ones that you can and are actually supposed to cover in fabric I decided to cover regular buttons in fabric. It worked to some degree but I really think I’m going to have to order some different buttons and redo it because now that I’ve tried it on and put it on the mannequin it feels like the fabric is gonna come off anythime soon. But I’m still going to show you how I did it.
First, I just attached the button as normal onto the dress. Then I took a piece of fabric that I wanted to cover the button with and drew a circle that was bigger than the button. I don’t know how much bigger, I totally eyeballed that, but it has to cover the entire button so I’m guessing double the size? Anyways, I stitched around the circle and then cut it out around the stitching. Then I put it over the button and pulled the thread. I also put some more thread around underneath the button to make sure the fabric stays in place and doesn’t fray. I did this with the thickest thread I had because you have to pull it rather tightly so I had to make sure the thread could withstand that pulling without breaking.
Then I did the same thing in the back and added some button holes with the machine.
Now I only had to close the rest of the sleeves and add another seam to the bottom of the dress so it looks like it’s made out of two pieces of fabric. As I already mentioned, I ended up sewing the sleeve together instead of adding hooks and eyes simply because, to be completely honest, I hate sewing hooks and eyes and I also couldn’t imagine it staying closed throughout the day when you’d wear it. I think Anne’s dress had hooks and eyes, if I’m not completely mistaken it was visible in a closeup but I just opted for the “easy way out”, which, ironically enough, took me about an hour on each side as it was so difficult to sew from inside of the sleeve without catching any other piece of fabric in between. But this is the result which in real life is even less visible as the color of the thread matches the fabric pretty well.
And lastly, I had to sew the final bottom seam. I just folded a bit of fabric over and machine stitched on top of that.
And this is the result of the finished dress-
It’s been very challenging this time, but I’ve also learned not to ignore lining and the importance of beautiful, neat seams on the inside! (The inside is a complete disaster, hence why I’m not posting pictures of it). But overall it looks really nice, I’ve been a little self-critical about it but I think it turned out okay in the end. It’s just frustrating that I decided not to line the skirt and now I’m regretting it because it’s just laying so flat! I think I might make a petticoat for it. It would’ve been worn under that dress anyways. But in all honesty, I think that with every project I get a little bit better because I make all those mistakes. Now I know that I should always line my fabrics no matter how lazy I’m feeling or that I should leave enough seam allowance to fell my seams.
Some projects are more challenging than others but maybe those are the ones that I can learn the most from.
