As I Sew: I prefer to look like a rainbow fell on me.

As much as I promise myself I'll dress fancy, I still look for easy outfits more often than not. This leads to a need for simple dresses that don't wrinkle like it's their job, and that don't require 4 layers of underpinnings.

A few weeks ago I got a comfortable, super simple knit dress from H&M that still looks appealing to me. I'm not a big fan of sewing knits, but eh... (come on, self, this is so easy! You can totally make more of these!) I could easily fold up the dress and use it as a pattern.

My first idea was to make a super shiny top to wear out, but somehow, despite both the dress fabric and the fabric I had for the top being about the same level of stretch, the top came out much too small. It cut into my underarms and squished my chest. I didn't leave enough seam allowance to fix it. I thought I would just use the rest of the fabric to make a skirt (my default) but because I had cut the top out, there wasn't enough left. Ugh, okay. Next project.

I had some leftover knit fabric from when I made leggings a couple years ago. I grabbed one of those and figured I'd have just enough to make one of these dresses. Since the fabric was a 4-way stretch, I ended up cutting one dress panel with horizontal and one with vertical stripes. No pattern matching required! I'm really quite happy with how this dress came out, and the lack of problems making it. It all went together well the first time.

As you can see, I bound the edges with some bias strips of the fabric. If you stretch the binding as you sew it on, it pulls the dress (or tank top, t-shirt, whatever) edges nicely to your skin and keeps it from gaping. If I had to pick out a problem with this dress I'd say I wish the joints in the binding were smoother. The fabric is a little thick and having 5 layers of it in places made some obvious bumps. I doubt anyone will notice except me.