Strapless Red Minidress: What I Learned, Part I

Annie's strapless red minidress is almost finished, just in time for her school's Winter Wonderland dance this Friday night. I promise I'll post photos of Annie wearing the finished product, but in the meantime, here are some valuable lessons I learned from making this dress, which began as a sewing class project under Susan Khalje's tutelage:
Work out your fitting issues first in the muslin. Well duh, you're saying. What I mean is really work out your fitting issues in the muslin, at least 90 percent worth. This (photo above) is the third muslin I made before Susan told me I could proceed to working with the fashion fabric, in this case duchesse satin; I used the muslin as my pattern. And what great advice: I only had to make minor tweaks, like taking in the side seams a bit, in the duchesse satin and this dress fits Annie like a glove.


For maximum control and precision, be prepared to hand sew. A lot. The hand sewing I've done on my faux-Chanel jackets is nothing compared to the hand sewing I did with this dress. Seam lines were basted (photo above shows two layers of organza—the bodice underlining—basted together at the seam lines), the fashion fabric was basted, seams were catchstitched, the zipper was pickstitched by hand, the lining was attached by hand, etc. The payoff of all this hand sewing is that I did very little ripping out of machine stitches: by the time I sat down at the machine everything had been precisely basted into place. I have more perfection in this dress than anything I've ever made. Woohoo! Learn to love hand sewing and make sure you have adequate lighting and vision amplification. (I use a magnifier that Birgitte recommended. My kids laugh at me when I wear it but, hey, it really helps.)


Flannel hides the ugly stuff. As this dress is strapless, it needs boning to help it stay up. Boning is ugly and should be as invisible as possible. To prevent detecting its presence from the front of the dress, Susan had me place a layer of flannel (I happened to have black flannel in my stash) in between the duchesse satin and the organza underlining. (In the photo above you can see the organza basted to the flannel.) This is why you take a class from the masters—so you can learn little gems of wisdom like this. Now I have a whole new respect for dowdy flannel and the tricks it can do, like beefing up a hem (see this month's Threads for Susan's article on hems).

Here's a photo (above) of the bodice all hand-basted together. You can see all the layers—duchesse satin, flannel and silk organza—that compose the bodice of this dress.


More tips to come!