I bought Sew Over It Penny dress pattern already last June but I only made it into a blouse. Now I finally found a perfect fabric for it and decided to test the rest of the pattern.
The fabric
The fabric that I used was lovely floral viscose crepe from Eurokangas that is very hard to handle but that looks lovely. Why it is so difficult? The fabric shifts and stretches and tends to snag to pins and needles. Even though I had sprayed the fabric with starch and used considerable time straightening the fabric, I ended up cutting one side of the collar 3 times. However, now I can be sure that the collar drapes nicely!
Sewing
I had trouble fitting all the pattern pieces on to the fabric and had to take some length out of a skirt piece. (I do this often and usually the skirt stretches in bias direction so much that it doesn’t show in the final garment.) However, when I tried to fasten the skirt to the bodice, I realised that my skirt was huge! A little googling revealed that the original pattern had had a mistake and that you only needed one half-circle skirt piece for the dress.
I, of course, had the original pattern having bought it very soon after it was released and thus had cut two skirt pieces and already sewn them together using French seams! Unpicking seams in this fabric is very difficult and often ends up in snagged threads and damage that is hard to fix. I looked at my beautiful French seams and gave up deciding simply to cut away the French seams. I figured out that the stretchiness of the fabric would compensate the reduced waist line length. Luckily this worked out and I got to use the fabric that I had already cut into skirt pieces.
Otherwise sewing up this dress wasn’t difficult. I found pretty blue and pearl buttons to decorate the front.
The finished dress
I am happy how I managed to pattern match the front bodice. It has separate button bands so I had to cut all the four pieces separately to make sure that the pattern flows through the center front.
I like the elasticated waist that makes this dress very comfortable to wear. The skirt moves very nicely when walking. In the images I have a small petticoat underneath the dress but it is not really necessary.
I think this will be one of my favourite dresses this year. It is comfortable, the fabric doesn’t crease much and the dress also looks good with a cardigan, so that I can easily wear it on colder days. Besides, I just noticed I own a perfect pair of earrings to match the dress!
So, if you have a need for an easy vintage style summer frock I can warmly recommend Sew Over It Penny dress!
Happy sewing!
Katja
