Winner Winner, New Dress for Dinner

Graca, who blogs at Sew Essentially Sew, has been running a series of great pattern giveaways, and I was the lucky winner of McCalls 8133!

It even has a square-neck version!

When I saw this pattern offered up on her blog I was struck with a vision of myself wearing the sleeveless, square-neck View B with a broad-brimmed sun hat while sipping a chilled chardonnay on the veranda of the Ashland Springs Hotel, where I will be staying next week.

My voyage was a bit hit-or-miss, but I think I got there in the end!

Lately I've been sewing mainly from my BurdaStyle magazines, because I have a stack 4 feet high and I've figured out how their sizing fits me. I knew I'd have to play around with this pattern to figure out the fit and I knew from my tireless sewing research (a.k.a. reading my favorite blogs) that McCall's probably built in more ease than I'm used to with BurdaStyle.

If I take a deep breath I'm a 36" bust. That would put me in McCall's size 14 which, the pattern envelope advised me, would result in a garment with a finished bust measurement of 42 inches. Too much for my taste. So I started with the size 10, designed for a 32.5 inch bust. And a 25 inch waist. Ha! Not a chance.  But how to tell if they'd designed for 6 inches of waist ease too?

The bodice has lovely princess seams in front and two darts in back. I measured the flat pattern pieces at the waist and tried to do the math, remembering (on try #2) to subtract for the darts and all those seam allowances. Dang, that's a pain to do in inches. This is why the rest of the civilized world went metric. After running through a few pages of figures and failing to come up with the same answer twice, I just cut the straight size 10, thinking I could always take a smaller seam allowance at the waist.

I like the back - feels very summery.

Actually, it came up fitting pretty darn well; even a bit loose. This way I can have some brie and baguette with that chardonnay and still sit comfortably for Two Gentlemen of Verona.

I used some cotton from the stash that I got on sale at a local quilting store. I liked the colors and it was cheap enough that I thought I could use it for muslins. There was enough to give this dress a go, but only just. The skirt on this little number is pretty full.

Once I saw the fabric and the pattern together, I really liked the combo. Which is why it was doubly sad that I spaced out and cut the wrong facing pieces. Doh. Fiddled around for a while to see if I could re-cut, but no dice. Not enough fabric, even if I cut with the grain all catty-wumpus.

Here's my hidden silver lining: there was a time when I would have collapsed into despair at this point, after casting the partly-constructed dress into the back of the upstairs closet. Now that I have a little more sewing experience under my belt, I thought of three ways I could salvage my summer sundress dreams.

1. I could make the version with sleeves instead. Oddly, there was enough fabric left to squeeze out the sleeves. I was wedded to the sleeveless vision though, so I rejected option 1.
2. I could use bias binding instead of facings to finish the sleeves. But the sleeveless view had an all-in-one facing that I really liked and I feared the neck facing would be impossible to tame if it weren't incorporated with the sleeve facings. So I rejected option 2 as well.
3. I could just cut the facings out of some other fabric. After all, if I do my job well the facings should be invisible, right? Right! So I went with option 3.

OK, so they're not totally invisible, but close enough for government work!

A million thanks, Graca! I'll be toasting you from the veranda on Tuesday night!

My review is on PatternReview.com here.