There was much procrastination involved in this dress, especially when it came to the last bits of finishing, but it is finally done and photographed and I'm very happy with it.

The fabric is a Nani Iro print from my stash. I don't remember what it was originally intended for but I've never been able to bring myself to cut into it before. The pattern is from the same Japanese craft book as October's dress (I think it is called Everyday Dress and Slip) and you can see the sample from the book in the second picture from this post. I really liked the simple shape of it and the way it took advantage of a border print. The fabric I used has a small border print along the selvedges that I particularly wanted as part of my dress.

I took a lot of chances with this dress: I didn't want a zipper and cut both my front and back pieces on the fold (meaning that if I later discovered I needed a zipper I wasn't going to have enough fabric to add one); I couldn't actually try pulling the dress over my head until I was nearly finished and cutting the placket (I did measure and make an educated guess before hand); I wanted the border print to be right on the bottom of the dress and had to figure out how long it should be before cutting anything ... all in all, it was a bit of a stressful process. I used almost my entire piece of fabric. There are just a few skinny wedges leftover and there is selvedge in both my shoulder seems and my hem.

I really like the armhole finishing for this dress. It calls for bias binding to be sewn to the seam allowance, then the allowance is trimmed, the bias binding folded over and the whole thing is turned to the inside and sewn down. It's so neat and tidy. The printing on my fabric is a bit rough so I used some very soft voile I had around for my binding instead.

When I started this project I really wanted to take all my dress pictures outside but reason, and prior experiences with frostbite, convinced me that was a bad idea so I set up the tripod in my sewing room instead. This also meant I could wear some cute shoes that don't normally get worn. Too fun. When I was all finished I went back into the kitchen to pour a second cup of tea. I don't think anything can make you feel quite as awesome as wearing three inch heels in your kitchen.