Troubles with ruffles - The second version of The Vampires Wife dress (version 2)

  I originally intended to cheat with the ruffles and to gather a short one and a long one that I intended to put along the sleeve edges together but it just did not work. After 2 attempts when the gathering threads broke and I redid again only to have the gathering threads break again, so then I had to give up. I gathered both seperately but having added the wider frill decided this is frilly enough and have left it as that.

I ended up redoing the hem rolled edge as well because despite my carefulness making everything the same width it still did not quite line up on the sleeve so I did this again after attaching to the sleeve. Next time I will join the sleeve frills before I gather and add as a circle the same as the skirt frill.

Then having finally got the frills onto the sleeve I have somehow made one with a smaller edge frill than the other!

Can you see? Yes probably!

 This is how the sleeve frills look when side by side:

 I suppose its not too bad!

Bother it! I am going to live with this because this has taken me far longer than I expected and most people will probably never notice. Of course I will - every time I wear this dress.

My test for this ( other people noticing) is to show my other half and if he cannot see what is wrong even when I tell him what he is looking at, then I assume most other people won't either. A sewist probably will but in my real day-to-day life there are very few of them around so I will leave well alone here.

In the end this is yet another muslin really to get my sleeves right - as in how they fit and look overall.It will however make a very nice summer dress even if its just a muslin.

So again this week not much progress on my TVW dress at all. I got so frustrated with the frills I decided it is time to stop and do something else instead rather than keep going and wreck it.

I am starting to think maybe the sleeve gathers on top of the sleeve I was so fretting about last week may be OK after all though now its together and on Harriet you can see here it does not look too bad and does look pretty similar to The Vampires Wife, so I have overlocked all the edges with the reasoning I want this version to be as RTW as possible and properly finished.

My last muslin ( seen below) has mostly raw edges. It still looks OK outside but I am wishing I had finished the inside off better. I had large seam allowances and did not want to cut anything down until I knew it would fit which made it very difficult to over-lock the inside.

The Vampires Wife birthday dress

 I have cut out the neck facing.

Sadly this version will have to have the usual shoulder seams because I have only very small bits of fabric left. I did like my one piece neck facing on my original muslin:

three piece neck facing with shoulder seams

The one piece facing with no shoulder seams on my original muslin seen here

I did actually manage to get everything for this version of The Vampires Wife dress cut out in the same direction though, which was worrying me when I began this version, so that's a plus and bearing in mind I had such a small piece of fabric to play with ( just under 2m and badly cut at an angle) I feel this is overall going OK. So I really must go slowly and not ruin this dress because it is going to be very wearable once it gets hotter which it will as the summer comes.

Next on my to do list - attach the skirt - it is just pinned in place in the pictures here, add the back invisible zip and add the skirt frill, then finish it off with a neck facing.

I think this dress is going to hit just around knee length.  I expect to finish this by next weekend though so see you then with my second version of The Vampires Wife dress. Fingers crossed it works as well as my last version.

Thanks for reading

Bracken