Butterick 6019 Completed!

I ran into so many issues while making this dress that I cannot believe it is finally done. At some point, I thought that I would never finish it. Sort of like my M.A. thesis 🙂 (I did finish the thesis in the end.) I kept noticing things that should be changed here and there and it kept on going. Sometimes you just have to say “It is done! I am not making any more changes!” if not it can go on forever. Having said that, I noticed after the photo-shoot that I still need to make one small change 🙂 I’ll get to that.

I actually love how elegant this dress turned out. I intended it to be for daily wear and that’s why I picked linen as fabric. However, I think that with the right accessories this dress could go either way. You can wear it to a dinner date or to a wedding party.

This pattern is definitely for the advanced sewer. It has cups, boning and lining for the bodice. You can read about how I made the cups and sewed the boning here. I think that the instructions were pretty clear and explanatory for such a complicated dress. Both the lap zipper and the hemming took me a long time. I let the dress hang for a day before hemming it.

Now let’s get to the issues that I had to tackle. I made a muslin for the dress bodice which fit quite well. I only had to make minor changes which you can read here. However, after sewing the bodice and before attaching the skirt, I tried it on. It came out huge. I still cannot figure out exactly where I made a mistake. Perhaps the linen expands more than the fabric that I used as muslin? Or maybe somehow the shirring on the actual bodice did not shrink the bodice as much as the muslin? A combination of the two? I am still trying to figure it out. I ended up taking in 4 cm (1 5/8”) from both sides of the back bodice. Then, I made the same change to the skirt.

The other problem that I notice now is I did not sew lining to the skirt. It was not in the instructions and for many fabrics you don’t need to. But in this case, the light weight linen makes the skirt a bit see-through. I am thinking of adding lining to the skirt to feel more comfortable.

Despite the long process and the problems, I love how this dress turned out. I think that this is a great pattern to use as a base for constructing other types of dresses.