The crepe fabric from Minerva arrived at my door step and I was pumped to make this version of Vogue 1844 in the style on the pattern ie dark dress with white neck band and metal buttons.

All the pattern adjustments were planned by making the test dress in linen.

The variable was the crepe fabric. You can’t tell from the photo but this crepe has a slight texture to it. The fabric is very light weight and the fabric structure, while woven, has the slightest amount of stretch along the grain of this fabric. This was a good discovery because I was able to use this nature of the fabric to make the sleeves fit neatly into the armholes. I used this nature of the fabric to sew the invisible zipper in accurately. I made great use of this nature of the fabric to hem it onto the cotton lining.

Unlike version 1 of this dress, the construction steps were the same, but the nature of the fabric was different.

The neckband fabric was from my stash. I chose it because it had the same lightness as the crepe fabric. I wanted the whiteness to be a stark contrast to the navy colour and I used white interfacing to keep its brilliance. This made a huge difference making the shiny silver buttons look even more brilliant.

Now one of the issues I had to solve was using the same buttons on the pockets. Now the pockets are lined with the cotton lining but I didn’t use interfacing for the pockets. This meant the buttons were going to make the pockets sag.

My solution was to sew small black snaps behind the buttons to keep the pockets in place. They don’t sag.

This time the dress was still a bit baggy after shaping the centre back seam, so I resewed in the invisible zipper for more shape and took 1cm out of the sides seams from the bust to high hip.

Adding darts for waist shaping would have changed the original design of the dress so I held back from adding them.

I was thrilled the sleeves were perfect in length and shape. The cuff seems to be shorter than the sleeve so I was more satisfied that I could make the sleeve cuff work better this time.