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 :-)
I'm checking out the close ups of your buttons and comparing them to the pattern/directions in my lap...did you extend what becomes the front closure and make those buttons functional? Or did you add them to the top as decoration and use snaps like the pattern directs? I sorta hate nonfunctional buttons - I'm not a huge fan of "fake functional" embellishments - if buttons are there then they should DO something, you know? I'm trying to decide if I want to do away with the snaps entirely, and if so I'll probably want to think about reshaping the front closure a little. Which is what I'm wondering if you've done....