Walkaway
And here is the finished Walkaway Dress, trimmed, snapped and buttoned!
Everything continued very smoothly and easily, although heavens, that's a lot of hemming! An hour and a half of hemming on an eight-hour dress is considerable. The pattern has you do the hemming as soon as possible, which I think is a good call; by comparison, the bias tape binding just FLIES by. The flip side of interminable hemming, though, is ending up with a delightfully girly circle skirt, fit for the Princess of 1952.
I'm very pleased with the buttons we found for the front closure; David pointed out that they're fittingly evocative of the Japanese aesthetic of the indigo print:
I'm so much happier with the final product now than before the buttons and binding went on; I think the mixture of colors is much more integrated now. The only thing that's a bit annoying about the pattern - and I'm sure that some of the thousands of Walkaway Dress seamstresses of the past have thought up a solution - is that since the sheath part of the dress doesn't have a back to keep it in place, it can tend to bunch up in front as the wearer walks. I'm thinking that just a little tack of the sheath's bottom edges to the inside of the circle skirt would go a long way toward solving the problem. It might make the dress slightly more difficult to get in and out of, but I think it would be worth it. Whether I ever get around to doing it is another question. As you can see, I am a shifty devil.
Most importantly, it's super-fun to wear, and it was a nice, fluffy ride in candyland to start and finish a dress within the space of 72 hours. I wove in the ends on Secret Knitting the same day I sewed the buttons on Ms. Walkaway, so my number of in-process projects is down from four to two, which feels infinitely more manageable. Overall, I am a happy camper. Princess. A happy, camping princess.
Gorgeous, Emily! The dress looks fantastic in those colours and it's great to see the finished product :-)