Sixties Dress

I am continuing to work my way through sewing some amazing charity shop dress patterns, and this week I tackled what I believe to be the oldest in the pack - copyright 1968.

The material I used was from my Pembrokeshire holiday haul.  A duvet cover I purchased for a pound.  I chose this material as I specifically liked the idea of tackling a bit of fabric placement and the bottom panel of the cover gave me that challenge.

I pondered whether to fussy cut the sleeves to also include the broad green panel that is on the bottom of the dress, but after considering the issue I thought it would be better to line the sleeves up with the fabric drop so that they blended into the sides more.  I have a tendency to over embellish and I thought too much green panelling would be overpowering.  I'm pleased how exactly the fabric panels match up - I hope you can see the match in the photo above.

 

I love the raglan sleeves but they did present a problem when it came to inserting a lining to the front and back of the dress - something that the original pattern did not have.  In the end I caught the lining at the neck edge, sewed the side seams independently from the main fabric and then slip stitched the lining to the sleeve seam.

Originally I meant to make the pattern loose - like the light blue dress shown below - but when I put it on it was just too tent like.  It would have been ok had I been able to shorten it and wear it as a tunic but then I would have lost the green panel that was the main reason I had chosen this fabric.  Dilemma.
 

In the end I decided to make a casing, which is actually used in the longer dress above with the yellow ribbon.  There was a slight trepidation in doing so as I had already attached the lining and was sure that I would accidentally keep catching the main fabric as it bunched up underneath but luck was on my side and it came out the other end ok!

Finally, just to prove that I do wear my handmade creations outside of  the house, here I am at a soiree wearing the said dress.  To match the dress I had a teeny tiny snowball cocktail as I remember my mother drinking it only at Christmas time many years ago.  Good job I only tried a little bit as I definitely prefer the dress to the drink!