During the first UK wide lockdown in June 2020 I bought quite a lot of fabric, some for my daughter as she wanted to make oven gloves for when she went to uni (yes really!) and mainly to make masks, but among it was some gorgeous grey cotton fabric with bees and flowers on it. I wanted to make a nice dress I could make for work, when I finally went back. I looked through my pattern stash and in the first British Sewing Bee book there was a pattern for a tea dress that I liked the look of.
I’ve alway had issues with fit around the bust for dresses and tops, so I decided to make a (hopefully wearable) toile first.
Fabric haul, the grey fabric is at the back 
The patterns in the Sewing Bee book are downloadable, so the first task was to chop and stick the pattern together – not much fun for full length dress pieces!
I didn’t get round to making the toile until 2021. I chose a pink and white polka dot fabric for the toile, but when it arrived it was very thin. I still made up the pattern in a size 16 which looked right for my measurements. The dress was fairly easy to make up. The facings fitted nicely and the sleeves fitted were easy to set in. I struggled quite a bit with the invisible zip, but that was mainly as I didn’t have the right foot for my sewing machine – I bought an invisible zipper foot later and it is a complete game changer! I also found I don’t know left from right as I managed to put the zip on the wrong side of the dress.
The only hack I made was adding pockets (why don’t patterns have pockets??)
First pic of the dress, without the belt
The dress is shown in the book with a shop bought belt, but I decided to make a belt out of fabric. I followed the excellent instructions from Professor Pincushion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shx7f5mE_zw The instructions are really straightforward to follow I bought a punch tool from Prym, which really helped, once I’d figured out how to use it (again, thank you YouTube). There was a huge sense of achievement at making a belt with a buckle and everything!
As you can see from the pictures, the fit across the bust of the dress was terrible. I did wear the dress once or twice, but it was uncomfortable, and the fabric was far too thin. I liked the overall style of the dress though and I really wanted to make the dress in the bee fabric, so I started to look for solutions and realised I needed to make a full bust adjustment, but this seemed very scary so I put it off. To be continued….
Ruth stitches and sews 