Beauty is in the eyelet of the beholder

When I bought the pretty white fabric for the white dress I am planning, I at first thought that I would have, as I usually do, a tonne of fabric left over, and I thought that it would be nice to make a sheath dress with the rest. Naturally, when I laid out the pattern, I barely had enough fabric to make the original dress. The idea of having a white sheath was in my head, though, and it wouldn't go away. Then I was reading some back entries of Lladybird's blog and came across this tutorial on underlining an eyelet dress. Here was the answer: I would make the sheath dress of white eyelet underlined in robin's egg blue, left over from lining the green Easter Parade dress.

And here it is! Ignore the horrible picture of me; look at the dress.

I'm heading back to London in a few days, and you know that means that there will be a lot of cream teas in my future. I was planning on just winging it most of the time, but I did book afternoon tea at Fortnum & Mason's for next Friday. Because I am crazy and Need. More. Pressure right before going away, I decided that I needed the eyelet dress to wear to tea.

I bought the fabric a couple of weeks ago. And then sat on it for a week and a half.

Fortunately, it goes together really quickly. Once it's cut out, that is. Why does that always seem to take twice as long as the actual sewing part? The pattern is by McCall and I've had it for ages; in grad school I made the sheath out of the same green fabric I used for the Easter parade and back then I had to topstich the neckline and armholes to keep the facing from rolling out. Since making The Dress and the Easter parade dress, I have learned about understitching, which the McCall's pattern doesn't mention -- I don't know why, since it stops the rolling issue. Understitching rules!

Because I realized I was running out of time, I finally did the sewing yesterday. I had arranged the pattern so that the hemline fell along the scalloped finished edge of the eyelet (and the selvage of the lining) so that I wouldn't have to hem the dress, because if there is anything I dislike more than sewing darts,^*, it is hemming. I lowered the neckline and put in a lapped zipper instead of the usual plain one. Because the lining fabric frays like a mofo, I decided to finish the side seams using French seams. How fabulous and couture of me.

Yeah. I forgot that this pattern has zero ease in the hips. When I tried on what I thought was the almost finished dress, I just barely got it past my hips. There would be no walking in this dress, let alone sitting and drinking tea. When I looked at the original green dress, I saw that I'd had to leave pretty much no seam allowance to make it comfortable.

So my almost-finished dress was now... rather not finished. I had to pick out four seams -- only to the waist, but still. Then I resewed the seams using the edging tool. Problem solved, mostly.

I used plain white cotton for the facings because I thought the eyelet would be too thick. Using nude interfacing might have been a mistake, though, because it makes the area seem a bit dirty.

The one issue I have right now with this dress is that it's really difficult to zip up past my middle back without contorting my arms into yoga-like positions. I guess I just need to practice stretching. I can't bike in this dress without raising the skirt to scandalous heights, so I might add a sew-in gusset, like this one I saw on Let's Go Ride a Bike. But overall, I'm pretty happy with it.

Bring on the tea!

^*I really dislike sewing darts. I'm not really sure why, other than the fact that I can't sew in straight lines very well and I'm a bit paranoid about ending the darts properly. They always seem to turn out, though.