Blog, The Waffle

Lucky Dress

December 2, 2013

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Hey Peeps!

It’s Dressember, how exciting! My Christmas tree is up, my advent calendar is out and the shops are selling Christmas biscuits, bliss. I have all my Christmas presents under control too which is very unlike me. Everything that needs buying is bought and I now have the next twenty three days to make the rest of the pressies which is totally doable and going to be so much fun.

Yesterday I finally completed my first By Hand London Anna dress which I have christened The Lucky Dress (how lovely is the four leaf clover fabric?!)….

……which I absolutely love! I really wanted to make this dress after seeing all the gorgeous variations floating around on the interwebs (especially Dolly Clackett’s many iterations…I have the biggest girl crush on her). The pattern is very easy to put together and the By Hand girls have a great step by step sewalong to help with any little issues that may arise.

I started out by tracing the size 4/8 and then doing the FBA (thats Full Bust Adjustment BTW) adding the extra 3″ I need. I then lengthened the bodice by 1″ which worked brilliantly for the muslin, rather stupidly though I decided to only muslin the bodice and just wing the skirt….ooops! The finished hip measurement for the size 4/8 comes in at just under 43″ which just fitted my 42″ hips and I got as far as sewing in the zip and finishing the back seam before I decided that it just didn’t suit me, I wanted a fuller skirt. So out came the stitch ripper and I unpicked the skirt (and skirt lining), ordered myself another 1.5 metres of the fabric and used a Kittenish Behaviour skirt pattern to get the look I wanted.

I decided to add a waist band as I knew the bodice pleats and skirt seams wouldn’t match up, this also helped my with prettying up the insides. When I make my next Anna/KB hybrid I’ll only lengthen the bodice by half an inch I think because with the waistband it’s just a little too long (but I’ll be damned if I’m unpicking it all again!).

I had originally lined the whole dress but I didn’t have enough lining for the second version of the skirt so I french seamed all the skirt seams instead. I finished the hem with some fairly stiff bias binding which I blind hemmed by hand (this is when I curse my love of floaty circle skirts…..profusely) and voilà my first Anna frankendress!

I love it and will definitely be making some more in this style, I think I’ll also try grading between the hip measurements and see if that helps me like the originally Anna skirt on me (I really want a maxi version of the Anna and I think the KB skirt in maxi form would be WAY too much!). So, what do you think?