Jim is a Rat and Other Cautionary Tales

This really needs to be the last crazy novelty-print fabric dress I make for a while. This fabric is fun, but like my newsprint dress and my “prom dress“, there are some places I wouldn’t wear this one.

The fabric is the newer Home Sewing is Easy print, the Hawaii edition. The comic appears to center on two women who are trying to get the attention of an (undeserving) male via their sewing skills. Unlike the first Home Sewing is Easy fabric which focused mainly on sewing, there seem to be two overall messages to this fabric:

1) Jim is a rat
2) Feminism is dead

But just look at my cute full skirt.

It’s a really full skirt, 4 widths of fabric, to be precise (but this fabric was only 45″ wide, unlike my other recent full-skirted novelty). I did no shaping of the skirt pieces; they are just gathered rectangles to keep it easy and to avoid breaking up the print any more than necessary.

For the bodice, I used a vintage pattern, McCall’s 5255. It’s a half-size pattern with 41-inch bust. I hadn’t tried this particular pattern before, but like all the others I’ve tried in this vintage size, the fit is perfectly acceptable to me without major alterations. When I make another (and I will), I might take it in a bit at the armscye area; the pictures seem to show a little gaping that I didn’t notice in the mirror.

The bodice is faced instead of lined. I know facings really bother some people, but they don’t bother me at all; I grew up wearing a lot of homemade clothes with facings. Let me qualify this a bit, they don’t bother me so long as I have Pete or Guinevere around to tuck them in where I can’t reach them. This facing seemed particularly nifty since it is arm and neck edges all in one. It was like a lot of clipping of curves all at once, especially with the sweetheart neckline, but it was fun to put together and left me with very little hand sewing at the end. The zipper is in the side seam. Hooray, I can reach it to zip myself! The side seam zipper also meant I didn’t have to try to pattern-match across the back.

This is my contribution to Heather’s Sundress Sewalong. There’s still time if you want to sew along too; it runs until the 18th of this month.

I did briefly consider climbing the tree here, but changed my mind when I realized that it would probably:

1) scuff my shoes
2) end with me falling on the ground

Some impulses are best thought about rather than acted upon.