My First Sewing Project - A Black Dress

If you have seen my About page, you would have seen that I said I hand-sew - 'tis true!

Below is my first project - an old fashioned black dress. Just a warning: these pictures are quite bad quality, but I wanted to post this post anyway. Hopefully this fall or winter I will do a photo shoot with this dress, and then they will be better. So please do not mind them at present!

When I was little, my mom would give me little bits of fabric to embroider, or a button to sew on to something, but I never really sewed until 2019. I was quite hesitant because I did not want to use a sewing machine.

I asked for fabric for a dress for Christmas 2018, and when I started, I was not sure what method I was going to use. I was willing to get used to using a machine if I had to, but I also wanted to try sewing it by hand.

I sewed my first seam with the machine, but after that I switched to sewing it all by hand, and have never gone back! I will be posting the other things I have sewn, and those are all by hand too.

I started in January of 2019, and finished it by April of the same year.

You might think that it is rather slow, but it is a useful past time during reading aloud, table conversations or other quite times. I just love it!

I sewed the buttons down on the sleeves. I made holes for the front buttons of course, but I did not want to do it again unnecessarily! You can see my stitches close up in this picture. Those ones are quite large; I have often done smaller ones on the seams that are showing.

The pattern is from Butterick: https://somethingdelightful.com/b6229.