Swimming Shrimps Dress

I looked at this fabric in several different colours at several different craft fairs before I lucked out and got this piece on sale. I nearly didn't buy it, because I already have a lot of blue clothes. But blue does look good on me!

The fabric is from Injalak Arts, Northern Territory. It's sat in my stash for 12 months now, so it was time to use it. But first, to hand wash it. It's important to pre-wash things because you find out if the dye is going to run, or if the fabric will shrink, and any other small issues you might have.

I have a lot of skirts these days, so I decided to make myself a dress. I did look at the patterns that I already owned, but most of them needed more than the 2 metres of fabric that I have. I also hate dress patterns... so I made my own! You can see how I did it here.

It is a princess-cut pattern, with internal folds down the front in place of darts to create shape around the bust.
The first thought I had was about the grain of the fabric. The grain runs paralell to the selvage edge of the fabric and it determines how the fabric will sit and hang. This is the sealed edge:

You are meant to cut with the grain of the fabric, so that the fabric hangs correctly - particularly important if you are using stretch fabrics.
This fabric is a cotton linen and it has a bit of give in it, but it's not too bad. But if I cut it with the grain the pattern won't run the way I want it to (vertical stripes are more slimming, visually).
I think that it will be okay if I cut it on the cross-grain, which runs at 90 degrees to the grain.

I doubled the material over, pinned my pattern down and cut out around it. It wasn't quite as wide as I wanted, for a more flared skirt, so I had to be content with more shape. I cut the front and back out together, so that the edges would match.

I had some pockets pre-made and ready to go, because I love having pockets on my clothes. So useful!

I cut the neckline with a more rounded shape than what I had on my pattern.

You can see that when I cut it, on the right side the material wasn't quite even. This is how I got it, just means that the material wasn't cut straight by the supplier. A shame.

The only difference with the back panels was the extra room that I left around the arm holes, for movement.

Pinned onto the manikin to get the princess folds into place:

And all pinned together, and boy did those curved folds cause me some trouble!

But here it is completely pinned and ready to sew:

So then I sewed it all together and hemmed the bottom edge.
I wanted to do something a bit different for the collar and had seen a couple of stand-up/folded varieties that I wanted to try. This was a tube of fabric connected to the top of the dress. Stiff enough that it would stand up, but could also be folded over. It worked beautifully!

When I tried the dress on for fit I added some pins around the arm holes, for a couple of places to tidy up.

A slight blip here where some of the fabric had caught in the seam I was sewing. I didn't want to unpick the whole thing, so I left it this time. Something to remember to avoid next time.