Butterick 5710 Sharlene and Natalie

Today I am posting Sharlene and Natalie's dresses.  For these ladies I used Butterick 5710 and boy did I have two different body types to deal with.

Firstly Natalie is about 5' 3" and despite having a baby 11 weeks ago, she is barely a size 8 (UK), and Sharlene is around 5' 10" and had a "F" cup size to deal with.  Now I am used to doing an FBA for me, but this was different and I had to make sure I added enough fabric.  Now because the cowl neck is attached to the front bodice, I had to remember to add the FBA to the cowl as well.

I found the easiest way to do this was to cut the bodice front and back as a toile and then put the scissors to the side bust and under bust to make sure there was enough fabric to cover that "F" cup.  This worked, albeit that it wasn't a conventional FBA, but this was an unusual top to do that on.

One of the other issues I had with Sharlene was her height - I added almost 6" to the length of the skirt and found the whole process difficult because my cutting table wasn't long enough to lay anything out in full. 

One area that I didn't pay particular attention to was the sleeve caps.  Like an idiot I attached the bodice lining and turned them right sides out and didn't realise that the lining was a little shorter than the fashion fabric sleeve cap, creating a hem.  A nifty bit of finger pressing, tacking and then pressing with my silk organza cloth and iron managed to sort this out.

Natalies dress was not too problematic, however I did have to create a modesty frill because the V neck in this pattern is quite low and just exposed her bra (this was a feeding bra) - if you were able to wear a low cut bra it would be fine, but be warned that you may want to make the V a little shorter if that is your preference.

Once again, I ironed on a light woven interfacing to hem these dresses to disguise any stitches on the right side.

This is a lovely pattern but it is cut on the bias and takes up quite a bit of fabric.  Some pieces allowed me to use those areas that were left over from cutting the bigger pieces, but on the whole it was difficult to squeeze the larger pattern pieces in these areas which meant moving down the fabric.  Thankfully I had purchase spare fabric.

I do like this pattern and may even make myself a shorter version once I have lost a few more pounds.  While posting about all the different dresses, I am contemplating what I want to sew next - I am thinking something simple that can be done on the serger/overlocker.

The fabric is the same as my underdress, a crepe backed soft satin.

I made no significant changes to the actual pattern other than to accomodate height or bust size issues.

Would I sew it again - yes probably a short version for me.

Would I recommend it - oh yes - this is a copy of the Pippa dress at the recent Royal wedding and Butterick have done an excellent job in recreating this for the home sewer.

I cut a size 8 for Natalie and a size 14 for Sharlene.

I'll post about the babies dresses tomorrow.

Catch you later...........................