At last the couture dress is finished, well I should say it was pretty much finished when I last posted during MMMay 2017 as it was worn to Government House on the 5th of May for an Investiture Ceremony as my husband was part of a group reciving a Group Bravery Citation for a resuce they assisted with in Japan in 2007. 

I realised that my in my haste to finalise the dress to wear to Government House, the zip was not as nice as I would have liked it and when your husband says he can see the zip you know it must be obvious.

So unpicking of the pick stitching of the zip happened as well as the lining being undone so it felt like it was going a long way back to get the zip back in,

and the lining, which is sewn in sections e.g. skirt, bodice and midriff.

The final step was to do a rolled hem for the silk lining,

adding some lace to finish it off.

With the wide neckline I also decided to add some thread bars to attach the dress to my bra to stop any chance of it slipping off my shoulders.

I found it interesting that once the dress was finished I wasn’t keen to wear it, it didn’t feel right.  So I took it along to one of my ASG Groups and asked my sewing friends what was wrong, the length, the sleeves or what?  The unamious decision was that the sleeves were too long so they were shortened by 2.5″ (nearly 6cm).

Since then the dress has been worn a number of times and I love the new coral/red accessories I now have to wear with it.

So here are some more photos of the dress after being worn all day at the office.

Unfortunately the jacket hasn’t progessed much further as my sewing time at present is on curtains for the house now that we have a new colour scheme and is also why there is a lot more knitting appearing.

is very slow, especially when you have been laid up with influenza for the last 6 weeks.

Our first day started with Susan Khalje discussing with the group what we were going to make and what fabric we were going to use.  I had purchased some wool crepe for my dress, but found in my stash some wool with a twill texture which I also took along as it was larger piece.   The class nominated I use this fabric which I was happy to do as I had now decided I wanted sleeves.

Next up Susan had us putting on our toiles and doing the first round of adjustments.  Thankfully my 4th toile was pretty good but still some minor tweaks were made.

These are then marked in another colour marker on your calico and the seams are then unpicked and the pieces ironed flat.

Everything is then laid out on your silk organza and cut out, then this is laid on top of your fashion fabric and you are ready to start hand basting each piece together.

For the next fitting, I used every pin I had and felt like an Echidna whilst Susan did the next round of tweaking.

Then it was more thread tracing of the adjustments and sitting down at the sewing machine and sewing it all up.

The midriff panel gave me some grief and you can see below the different adjustments I had to do to it.

By the time I left the class 6 days later, I had:

• the dress bodice, midriff and skirt all sewn together.
• hand picked the centre back zip.
• the right sleeve was basted in place, and the left sleeve was waiting it’s turn.

There is still a lot of work to do, I only finished the catchstitching of all the seam allowances over the Easter break and I am now in the process of making sure all the adjustments are on the pattern pieces so I can cut out the lining.