Polka dot Ice Cream Dress

I finally sewed an Oliver + S pattern! I feel like I’ve gained entrance to some secret society. 🙂 The fabrics were a pair of polka dots from our Vashon Island trek. (The photos aren’t quite true, the teal dots are brighter in real life than in these evening photos.) It’s been quite a project, spread over many, many naptimes in the last three weeks. Natasha was here to babysit tonight, and I finally finished it off. The pattern is wildly detailed – all sorts of overstitching and understitching and hem finishing and interfacing and ironing seams in different directions. I learned so much and I’m so happy with the way it turned out.
This is the ice cream dress, view A, in the 12-18 month size.

I still need to find a button for the back at the neck.

Isn’t it bright and sweet and cheerful? 🙂 It’s nicer in person, where you can appreciate all of the details. Shown here: gathers, neck hole notch, button loop, overstitching on the lined yoke.

The pockets have a band of accent trim with notches, and overstitching. The pattern has you stitch a seam to use as your fold line, it makes pressing the curve so much easier. I will do this more. There’s also overstitching on the yellow hem.

A detail of the sleeve. There are only two exposed hems in the dress (on the sides of the teal portion), and those are finished so they won’t fray. All of the remaining edges are trapped in the lining. It took ages to sew but it looks so pretty. That little teal hem at the underarm side of the sleeve is only an inch and a half long, and it looks so tiny and precise. Satisfying.

The bottom panel was worked in four pieces (front and back lining, front and back exterior), and again it trapped the unfinished teal edge so that everything looked pretty and finished. The hem used understitching – the first time I’ve heard the term but it’s supposed to make the hem lie flatter and have better structure. It looks SO pretty.

The sizing seems pretty true to the numbers, she is almost 10 months and this is still roomy. I can’t wait to find a good button. Right now it’s hanging on her wall – it’s such a cheerful, lovely finished thing.