This is something that I have made since returning from Sewjourn – and I haven’t even blogged all the items that I sewed there yet!  But I couldn’t resist, because I have become completely enamoured with Lekala patterns.

This dress is pattern #5859. It has lowered armholes, a centre back seam, and a lowered front waistline with a skirt that pleats into the left hand side. I ordered this pattern to my height, bust, underbust, waist and hip measurements, and think that the finished result looks very similar to the pattern illustration.

For my “wearable muslin” I used a knit that came to me via Anna’s stash (thanks Anna)! It was easy to work with, with assembly primarily done on the overlocker. Hems and neckline were turned, fixed in place with vliesofix, and stitched with the twin needle. The only difficult part was getting the pleats right. I did a lot of unpicking, resewing, unpicking, pinning, resewing, unpicking, pinning, etc with the pleats, and they are still not perfect. But they’re okay. The pattern instructions for the pleats is basically “make free pleats”. The illustration has six, and I ended up with four. I’ll play around with the pleats more in the next rendition.

These photos were taken at the end of the work day yesterday, so I think that the dress held up fairly well! I wore it with my StyleARC Marni jacket, and it fulfilled my requirements of being comfortable and I think fairly stylish.

I do find it tedious to cut and tape together pdf patterns, but at this price and this fit, it is more than worthwhile.