I came across the #Sewnwithnewlook challenge when I was scrolling through Instagram at the start of January. Its an online sewing challenge set up by Minerva.com and encourages you to sew up a New Look pattern during the month of January and share it online to get involved with the sewing community. I have lots of New Look patterns which I got free with Sew Magazine several years ago and have never sewn up, so thought this was a great opportunity to use one.
I had a look through what I had and decided on ‘K6261’, view C, as I had the exact fabrics in my stash to create the same look as on the pattern envelope. I used a beautiful navy blue lace which I bought four metres of in a charity shop several years back now for £9.99!! Plus some sky blue polyester type fabric given to me by my sister-in-law.
I first of all looked at the sizing and reviewed a combination of the body measurements on the back of the pattern and the finished garment measurements on the back of the pattern and on the pattern pieces themselves. According to the former, I would be a size 12 at the bust, 14 at the waist and 12 at the hips. The pattern says that it has approximately 3.5 inches of ease which is a bit more than I like to have in a fitted dress like this one. So I looked at the size 10 finished garment measurements and saw that if I sewed up that size, I would still have enough ease at the bust (1.5”), waist (0.5”) and hips (2”). So I made the decision to go with a size 10 as my starting point. Having traced out the size 10 pattern pieces, I then compared them to a similar pattern that I already have, and which I know fits me well, to these new pattern pieces and made some minor adjustments to the height of the bust darts and the position of the side seams. I also added 1.75 inches of length because I know I like to have skirts and dresses 23 inches from my waist.
Even though I was fairly confident that this would fit me well, I still made a toile just to be on the safe side. I did that out of an old bed sheet and the only adjustment I ended up making was to bring the side seams of the dress in from the hips down by about an inch on each side to give it more of a pencil style fit.
I moved onto cutting out the fabric. The main fabric was fine and the lace was actually not as tricky as I had feared. The only thing I did differently with the lace was to use the actual fabric front bodice piece as the pattern piece for the front lace bodice so I didn’t have to cut the lace out on the fold. That worked really well and I would recommend doing that if you are using lace.
The first sewing step was to baste the fabric and lace pieces together and I used my walking foot to do this so that both layers were kept even. The instructions say to baste half an inch in along the seam edges and also along the dart lines and this really helps when you sew the darts up given that you have two pieces of fabric on top of each other. The overall construction of the dress is really quite straight forward and the instructions are easy to follow.
The two most tricky parts are:
i) Adding the ribbon trim. The pattern gives you a guide piece which you trace out as a normal pattern piece and place over your bodice to help you place the ribbon. I can see how this would be helpful but I didn’t actually use it and instead just played around with the placement of the ribbon by eye and by reference to the diagram on the instructions. Its quite key that you get the placement correct for your own figure as the ribbon has the potential to ‘cut’ you off at the wrong place and visually alter the proportions of your body. Ideally the bottom piece of the four needs to sit on or just a fraction below your waist and then the top piece needs to go just under your bust
ii) The sleeves – unlike the dress, the sleeves are cut from lace only, so you don’t have the main fabric to stabilise them. This makes them a little more difficult to sew and also hard to mark your notches accurately (depending on the type of lace you use). I used pins to mark my notches which worked ok but tailor’s tacks would probably be best. The instructions recommend a French seam for the sleeve underarm seams which gives a neat finish
There are a couple of steps which I have to admit I didn’t actually follow and ‘fudged’ instead! These were the small finishing touches at the side seam hem area which were quite fiddly and you can probably get away with not doing if you are short for time (steps 13,14,15). In terms of the neckline facing and finishing the top of the zip nicely, which is the final step, I would recommend following a YouTube video from Made to Sew called How To: Professional Finish - Top of Invisible Zipper. This is an excellent tutorial and can be used on lots of your dress and top projects and produces a lovely finish. Unfortunately I only remembered to look at this after I had finished the facing, so went back and sewed a few extra stitches to neaten mine up.
All in all, this was a great little project and encouraged me to use a pattern and some fabric which had sat in my collection for a long time. The only sad thing is that this is quite a ‘dressy’ dress and most of my days are spent working from home and dog walking, so I don’t know when I will get the occasion to wear it! It would be such a shame not to put it to good use, so if you see me anywhere soon looking a tad overdressed….you’ll know why!
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