Belladone Dress by Deer and Doe in black and white vichy wool and mustard lining

Here I am to post a new sewing project finally! 🙂 I’ve thought about what to sew with this black and white vichy wool for months. I bought it on Supercut.it in September and since then I’ve thought about it. I changed my mind thousands of time, but I finally decided to sew a Belladone dress by Deer and Doe, a french indipendent pattern designer. I bought the pattern at Abilmente fair on last October.

I’m really happy with my choice. The dress is beautiful (I love the back cutout) and the pattern is perfect. For the first time I didn’t mix the sizes as usual, I chose the 38 and it perfectly fits, without any variation.

However I decided to make my life quite a bit more difficult with a series of choices that really put my patience to the test 🙁 :

• First of all, beautiful fabric but it completely drove me crazy! I tried every which way to match plaids, both in cutting and sewing, but there was no way and I gave up in the end, even if I managed to do it in some points.

• Wool in direct contact on my skin has always bothered me, so I decided to line the bodice. I used a mustard silk fabric that I bought at Gandini Tessuti in Milan last october. I’ve always loved to match yellow with black and this winter I’ve seen this matching in a lot of fashion and design magazines. It gives the products and the garments a touch of retro to in my opinion.

This was my first lining. It was complex to understand how to line, because the shoulders of the bodice were made of two piece instead of one piece only, due to the back cutout. I decided to use a french seam for the shoulders and a bias tape for the neckline and the armholes. The french seam turned out to be bad idea, because with the two fabrics (wool and lining) is too thick. Moreover I was careless and I sewed it using a 2,5 cm seam allowance instead of a 1,5 one, so the bust darts moved up by 1 cm and they are not perfect on the bust 🙁

Instead I like how the lining of the back cutout came out. I didn’t topstitch because I didn’t want too many visible seams, both in the right side and in the wrong one.

• I decided to use a centered zipper instead of an invisible one. Tragic choice!! 🙂 I had to sew and resew thousands of times, above all in the waistband. In that point the fabric was very thick and the needle didn’t go ahead. So I had to push the fabric ahead myself. As a result the waistband is all misaligned, because I pulled the cloth in order to have it slid under the press footer. I sewed and unsewed it up at least 3 or 4 times, but it didn’t work out. In the end I even risked to damage the wool fabric, so I decided to have my waistband misaligned 🙁 what a pity…probably if I had chosen to use an invisible zipper It would have been perfect. I’ll try to hide this defect with a belt.
  Anyway the most tragic thing has still to come! While I was cutting the tacking of the centered zipper I cut a little piece of the fabric on the right flap…what a disaster! I had to mend the hole, but the defect is so visible 🙁

Instead I’m really happy of my first handmade bias tape!
I followed this Colette Patterns tutorial (you can also find it in The Colette Sewing Handbook by Sarai Mitnick) and I have to say that, even if it was the first one, it came out well! Bias tape always gives me a lot of satisfaction 😉
I sewed it with the sewing machine on the right side and then I hand-sewed it on the wrong side, in order to not have visible seams outside. It was a long job, but I like the result!

Finally I hemmed up by hand (I didn’t use the skirt facing of the original pattern).

Despite the mistakes I love this dress! I’m really sorry for having damaged it, and exactly on the back, the stand out of the pattern. Do you have any suggestion to hide the waistband and the hole better? Have you ever damaged a dress exactly in the end?

Ps: It was just a little windy when we took the pictures on Sunday …and so cold!!!