The sleeves make all the difference...

This is McCalls 5444, last seen in February, languishing without sleeves.

Rhona came over last week for her fitting, so I've now been able to add the sleeves and most of the trimmings.

I did cheat a bit on the sleeves... the outer layer is made up of seven pieces for each sleeve, and the lining was supposed to be another four. Rather than cutting and assembling 22 pieces, I decided to cut the sleeve linings in one piece. I put together the outer layer, pressed all the seams, and then traced around the finished piece to make a template for the lining. Much better than having all those seams on the inside for no real reason!

The purple organza trim was a lucky find at work, earlier in the year. I grabbed everything that was left on the roll, and thankfully I have plenty. The trim is on every sleeve seam, under the bust and around the neckline.

All I need to do now is make the panel for the eyelets in the back, and add some trimmings to the hem and centre fronts. Hopefully that should go together a bit more quickly than the sleeves!

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!

McCalls M5444

This is the project that I'm working on at the moment - it's the second dress for Faerierhona.

It's a "Renaissance" style empire-line dress, with a faux underskirt and panelled sleeves. It laces at the centre back.

The fabrics are purple and silver satin, and all of the satin parts will be overlaid with silver organza.

The dress itself is a really simple one, but the sleeves are going to be complicated. Each of those puffy sections is comprised of three layers, to make sure that they sit nicely.

Given that the previous dress I made for Faerierhona was also a very simple construction except for the sleeves, I am beginning to sense a theme...

I'm really looking forward to seeing this one finished though. The colour scheme is lovely, and I think it's going to be another stunner.