tea in a tree

I'm back! Didn't I say I'd be back? I have lots and lots of plans for upcoming posts, which I will present to you very much not in the order I'd intended. I've had a sudden re-think on my January projects, and I decided that for some reason I'd get photos of my Unnecessary October Dress Pattern Haul parts four and five, but not part three. I think it made sense at the time. So now it's all going to have to wait because I don't want to rewrite the posts.

What I really do want, though, is to post another finished dress. Presenting my Christmas project, Sew Over It's 1940s Tea Dress, photographed in Sicily last week:

I'd been considering this pattern for a while and eventually bought both it and 2.5 metres of rayon crepe on a whim while ordering various bits of Christmas present from Sew Over It. I love dark dresses with white polka dots and I used to have about six of them, but they've all made their way to the charity shop over the last couple of years for not being quite right in one way or another.

I wanted to make this dress before going home for Christmas, but it wasn't until I went to get started that I realised I'd forgotten to pre-wash the fabric. I made another dress (coming soon!) in the meantime to use up my sewing energy, but instead of using it up it made it worse.  As soon as this fabric dried I got into a small fight with myself over whether I could start making the tea dress now given that I was a) leaving for Bristol in the morning, b) not even a little bit packed, and c) expecting my boyfriend to show up in a couple of hours. The only way I could convince myself not to was to pack the pattern, fabric and notions into my suitcase and suggest to myself that I could do it at my parents' house. Which, to my great surprise, I actually did.

I used my mum's fairly basic Singer, which she got free from a friend and has been sitting in the loft for some time. I quite enjoyed using it - I also used it to make a pair of tartan pyjama bottoms for my brother and it sewed through several layers of cotton twill without a grumble. My machine is less than a year old and it already whines and skips stitches when I try to sew anything more than two layers of lightweight cotton (plus it HATES knits), and the comforting robustness of Mum's machine even after several years of disuse has convinced me to upgrade as soon as I can feasibly manage it.

The dress came together fairly easily. The gathering was fine, the invisible zip was fine, the sleeves were fine. The neck facing was a bastard. It made the point at the neckline centre go funny and I've had to topstitch it down to make it stay on the inside of the dress. I've used many Sew Over It patterns now, and I love them, but they use these facings a lot and I find them to be an enormous pain. I cannot get them to stay on the inside no matter how much understitching and pressing I do. I think in the future I'll try a different way of finishing the neckline.

I'd like to make this dress again, but I'll be making a few changes. I cut between the 12 and 14 at the shoulders grading out to a 16 at the bust, but next time I'll cut the 12 and do a full bust adjustment (you'll see my first attempt at an FBA later this month. I'm slightly annoyed that all the people singing the praises of the FBA were completely right and I'll have to do one every time now. Hmph). Hopefully this would get the bust to sit under my actual bust, which it's not very keen on doing in this version. I could probably stand to go down a size in the waist (this one will need a bit of taking in before I wear it again). I'll also find another way to do the neckline. I also want to have a go at a jersey version of this dress, sized down and without the zip, as an experiment (and because I have 2.5 metres of navy jersey with a white floral overlay that I have no idea what to do with).

OK. Some pedant out there is complaining about the post title. We were to understand there would be trees, and you provide only boats? I would expect better of you. And in answer to that, all I have to say is:

Me: Look at that tree. It's huge. Looks pretty climbable too.

Boyfriend: Jen. Do you want to get in the tree?

Me: Well...

Boyfriend: You want to get in the tree, don't you?

Me: I really do want to get in the tree.

Boyfriend: Of course you do. Go on, then.

You tell me a better thing I could have been doing on New Year's Day than tree climbing in Sicily.

1940s tea dress: tree-climbing approved.