Close Enough for Government Work

Okay, so the dress is technically not finished. But it is finished enough to take a picture of. I still have to turn the lining under and tack it down around the bottom, but that is it. Before I do that, however, I want to get out my Vogue sewing book and look it up to decide how to do it.

I finished the dreaded zipper and hem. I set the iron down on the middle joint of my pinkie while ironing the hem out, yay! The zipper didn't turn out perfectly, but it turned out better than some past zippers I have done. I just haven't perfected the technique, though I do a lot better on short zippers, like for skirts. The instructions that are in the pattern are better than the ones that are packaged with the zipper (except one vintage zipper I used had really good instructions, but of course I lost them). I looked at the instructions in the Vogue book, too, but didn't use them because the ones with the pattern seem better.

One nice thing about black is that stitching mistakes in black thread don't show up. That's also the bad thing, that it's hard to see the stitching, and makes it a pain to rip stitches out. That's one reason I didn't go for solid black for this dress.

I sewed on one of the new labels I got for my Etsy stuff. Isn't it cute? I was very pleased with how they turned out.