McCalls M5444 - a work in progress.

Here's a long overdue post - a picture of McCalls 5444, ready for its first fitting.

As soon as the recipient has tried it on, I can trim the hem to the correct length. I also need to take a couple of pertinent arm measurements before I cut out the pieces for the complicated sleeve.

This photograph is making me feel a whole lot better about this dress. To be perfectly honest, I have spent the past two weeks fervently desiring to throw the damn thing into the garden and stomp up and down on it until I felt better about the world.

There are two reasons for this, one of which is that McCalls have made a teensy little error in the pattern, which means that the underskirt piece isn't actually the same size as the two front pieces it's attached to. This doesn't matter in the great scheme of things, as all the layers are gathered together at the empire line, but it did mean that I had to get a bit creative about the order of putting all the pieces together.

The second reason is that I don't work with satin and voile very much these days. This particular satin is a very lightweight one, perfect for gathering without being bulky, but unfortunately it's also extremely slippery to work with. I'm used to cotton, where the layers pretty much stick to each other, and don't shift about in the sewing too much. I hadn't allowed for the extra time it would take to pin everything, baste everything, sew everything, check the pieces hadn't shifted, unpick bits, sew them again...

I'm very glad that the dress looks so nice, now that it's on the mannequin and ready for fitting. looking at it like that, I feel as though I'm not making such a bad job of it after all!