An easy dress for beginners

I found this 'two-hour' New Look pattern while ransacking The Sewing Shop in Canterbury. Yes, I'm sticking to easy patterns for the time being, until I get my vavavoom and try more complex ones. This is easy peasy lemon squeezy, but takes a lot longer than the two hours it says it should take. Nine hours for me - I'm quite slow. There are no button holes or zips, which is a wonderful thing. Plus, the best thing for me about this dress is the pockets. I love pockets! I did two rows of stitching around the pockets for extra strength - I always end up with car keys, dummies, bananas, biscuits and water bottles in mine. The best bit about making this dress is applying the bias binding to the arm holes and neckline. At first I thought this would be so tricky I imagined myself having to glue it in place (blu-tak doesn't work does it?) but I watched a tutorial on YouTube by Liesl Gibson. She says not to bother pinning the binding in place, just use your fingers to guide it through the machine. This made it so much easier and resulted in pretty-much perfect results.


Now that I know that I can make this dress easily and, more importantly, wear it, I can search for lovely material. Two-and-a-half metres of fabric and two metres of bias binding, and that's it. Easy!