My crepe dress is causing me problems. It should be a really simple pattern to put together but I seem to be intent on making it difficult. My fashion fabric is a rather sheer voile and I added a layer of white lawn under it to make things more opaque. This shouldn't really make things difficult but for some reason it did. I managed to get past most of the problems I was having with flat lining my dress and now I'm stumped by the armhole facing. It just doesn't look right. Should it really be this shape?

I found Gertie's Crepe Sew-A-Long posts which have been really helpful (why did I not look them up before?) but the point where the seam is on her facings look a little smoother than mine. I'm contemplating reshaping that area so I don't have the little V in the edge of the cap sleeve. I'm definitely going to add some interfacing. The pattern doesn't call for it but my fabric is so limp I don't think the sleeve will sit nicely without it.

My goal for today is to deal with that facing and get the bodice finished for my dress. Then I can decide if I want to use the same fabric for my sash or the pink voile I found in the stash (I'm pretty sure I've got enough). But first I'll show you what I made yesterday.

You see I've been trying to make a decision about that facing since last weekend and I've been stumped since then. I've wanted to sew but didn't know what to do with my dress and didn't want to get into a different big project - this dress needs to be finished before I move on to other things. I decided what I needed was a little project. Something very small and simple, and preferably in a light colour so I wouldn't need to rethread my machine. So here it is: an eye pillow. I've been getting headaches kind of frequently lately - it's something that often happens to me when the weather is changing - and I thought a nice little pillow full of lavender would be perfect for those times when I just want to lie still and keep out the light.

Would you believe I actually started out searching for instructions in my craft books? I'd looked through three of them without finding anything and was wondering what I was going to do when I suddenly realized that … um … I probably don't need instructions to sew a rectangle and put some lavender in it. I measured my face to determine how big it would be and cut out some rectangles. The front is a double gauze from Heather Ross's Far, Far Away line (and just so cute), the back is a pink flannel that matched the frog fabric and there is a muslin pillow on the inside to stop the lavender bits from poking through. When I was hunting around for some lavender I found a pouch that also included some rose buds and smelled particularly nice so that is what's inside my  pillow, along with some flax seed to give it some weight. I may have over stuffed it a little bit but I thought I'd wait 'till I'd used it a few times to decide.

I said I'd finished a sundress on the weekend and here - with the help of my tripod and handy-dandy remote - it is.

I still call this April's dress even though March's isn't finished yet (it's cut out). It's very comfortable. I used the Mendocino sundress pattern and two layers of cotton voile (Anna Maria Horner's Little Folks). I love this fabric. When we went to Victoria at the beginning of April I was really excited about getting to visit one of my favourite quilting shops - The Satin Moon - and secretly hoping I'd be able to get a couple of voiles for this dress. I especially wanted pinks, one print and one solid, and they had just what I was looking for. In fact that's all they had left!

I used French seams to sew the sides of both layers and left out the pockets entirely. This fabric is too lightweight to handle having anything in the pockets anyway. I sewed the two layers together at the top of the dress with a regular seam since the raw edges are contained by the shirring. The shirring took a while. I probably could have spaced my lines a little further apart - half an inch instead of a quarter - but they give such a nice snug fit. The spaghetti straps were sewn in place by hand afterwards.

The hem may be one of my favourite features of this dress. I wanted the skirt to feel as light as possible so I … um … didn't hem it. When I cut out the pieces I measured the length of the Mendocino dress I made last year and cut this one to match. I did some controlled fraying to the raw edges and then let them be. It was a lot faster than doing two rolled hems and feels really lovely and floaty. I may trim the lining to be a little shorter than the printed fabric but for now they are the same length.

This dress says summer to me. That hot, sticky part of summer where it's hard to believe it will really get cold again. This dress is so lightweight. The fabric is Liberty's Tana Lawn in two prints that make me think of my garden. The skirt is cut on the bias making for a close fit that still allows for movement (and feels perpetually crooked - the first half hour in a bias cut dress always involves a lot of shifting things around).

I made a few pretty basic mistakes with this dress: I didn't add enough seam allowance to the top of the back piece and had to zigzag and turn over the edge instead of doing a proper hem; and I completely failed to notice that the bodice pieces were supposed to be cut from a double thickness until after I'd sewn on the bias trim. I decided not to fix that. It was going to be too much bother to unpick all the bias trim and I'd always be wearing a bra under my dress anyway.

On that note though - I really need to get a strapless bra that has a more slippery texture. The Tana Lawn, while fantastic in every other respect, has a tendency to be very grabby towards other fabrics. In looser dresses is isn't such a big deal but in my closer fitting sundresses it pays to be wearing silkier under things. On a related note, I think this dress would make a remarkably pretty slip for wearing under other dresses. I'm thinking of some silk charmeuse and maybe a bit of lace along the hemline.

I had some trouble with the fit of the back of this dress. You can probably see the bit of gathering across the back from the elastic I put in initially to deal with things. I'm not sure if I stretched the top back of the dress when I was putting it together or if it was just too big but there seemed to be a lot of extra fabric between my hips and my shoulder blades. Even with the elastic there was no way to adjust the dress and not have a huge fold of fabric in the back. It was remarkably unflattering when you consider that the fit was near perfect through my hips. I ended up doing a bit of pin-fitting and then taking out the side seams part way and resewing them. I was a little surprised at how much fabric I removed from the upper back of my dress (about 4"/10cm - those are my sewing snips for scale) and I'm wondering if I drew out the wrong size or maybe even the wrong dress back when I copied the pattern pieces out of the book.

My fabric for March's dress should be arriving soon but I'm still waiting to hear if the shop has got a copy of the pattern I want to use. I can't believe I'm six dresses into my project and only four to go! It's getting more difficult to decide what patterns and fabrics to use - there are so many choices.