I started this apron dress in August after originally planning an underdress from this fabric. This originally started as an outfit to match one that my partner made. I'll do a post on that later. I decided to hand sew the dress to give myself something to do during chemo.
There have been a lot of firsts for me with this dress.
1. I'm sewing everything by hand
Since I've done embroidery before and I'm decent at it (or so I tell myself), hand sewing was relatively easy to pick up on. That said, my stitching noticeably improved from one seam to the next. After the first seam, I remembered a trick I saw online where you can keep your lines straighter by drawing guide lines on your thumbnail. Once I figured that out, I was very pleased with how everything looked. (There was some seam ripping involved at this point.)
2. I've never flat felled a seam before. I'm fully aware that at least two seams are inside out, but I wasn't about to seam rip AGAIN to fix them once I noticed. (I halfway did later, but only to make it prettier). I will hand sew the underdress for this outfit and pay much closer attention on those seams.
3. I've never done facings or hem bands before. This was more of a learning curve than I expected, particularly the hem band. Hemming is one of my weak spots when it comes to skirts anyway. I haven't ever managed to get a perfect hem- any advice is appreciated!
4. I've never done loop straps before. All of my other aprons have flat straps that are attached to the front and back for convenience. This time, the brooches will actually be suspending the dress. I've heard that loop straps tend to roll around a bit so I'm planning to embroider them together to make them lay flat.
5. The embellishments (embroidery stitch and tablet woven trim) use new-to-me techniques. More to come on that later.
At the time of writing, the dress itself is fully assembled. Now I just have to make it pretty.
