Vogue 1087 is finished. I haven’t got any pictures yet because by the time I’d hemmed it there was no daylight at all, so instead I’ll tell you all about What Not To Do While Sewing Vogue 1087. Here’s the envelope picture:

My fabric is a dark blue wool jersey. It hides a multitude of sins, and this is a good thing.

This pattern has a lot of markings. Big circles, small circles, squares, and triangles. I carefully tailor tacked them using four different colours of thread as I’d done on my muslin. Only this time I absent-mindedly switched colour scheme halfway through, so I had green, brown, white, orange, and grey tailor tacks. Luckily I could remember enough of the construction details from the muslin to work out which tack matched to which. It turned out I hadn’t just added a colour, I’d somehow managed to switch the orange and white markings around at some point. Don’t do that.

The multitude of tailor tacks got quite annoying while sewing, so I started pulling out the ones I thought I’d done with after I’d sewed the match points. Only I managed to pull out some of the wrong ones, so the confusing part of the construction where you sew the back part of the dress onto the very complicated front pieces had to be done by guessing rather than matching up dots. Don’t do that.

The pattern calls for a lot of hand-sewn blind hems. I hate hand hemming with a passion so I thought I’d give that magic hem tape stuff a try. It seemed to work quite well on the first hems; it’s a little stiff but it kept them in place. The next time I went to press something I noticed my iron was catching on my fabric. I’d gone and left a scrap of the hem tape on the ironing board and it had melted all over the iron’s sole plate. And then transferred to my fabric. Don’t do that.

I managed to rescue the fabric by effectively shaving the melted glue off with a very sharp pair of scissors, and the iron was easy enough to clean once it had cooled down, but my ironing board cover is ruined. I did the rest of the pressing for the dress using an old towel on the board. This will do in a pinch but I can’t recommend it. You’d think I’d have learnt from this, but when I came to do the next set of hems I managed to leave the whole roll of tape sitting next to the hot iron. It sort of fused, so now I have a lump of glue rather than a roll of tape. Don’t do that either.

Despite all this the dress got finished and it’s not bad. Pictures next time, with luck. I’m going for a lie down.