Finished first dress

I finally finished the dress. My first dress. The first wearable thing I sewed. Well, I suppose for the first real thing I sewed it turned out alright! And I am very proud of myself! :-)

But there is alot to improve. Luckily - for me - in the photo it lookes much better and you don't see the not straight seems too much ... :-)
Also I did make a mistake on the backside therefore the slit in the dress is not exactly in the middle. But I couldn't bring myself to undo the whole seam again ... and just left it. Of course the button and buttonhole (I sewed a buttonhole!!!)  DID turn out to be completely unnecessary. My daughter can put the dress on and off without opening it! Well ... would have saved me ALOT of work and pain if I would have known that before. But on the plus-side - I did learn how to sew a buttonhole!!! *still-so-proud*

A few other things I learned while sewing this first piece:

You can actually leave in pins WHILE sewing if you put them in the fabric vertically to your seam. Everybody who KNOWS sewing will laugh at me for not knowing. But well - how was I to know!
(Maybe I should have read an introductory book before I started after all? *wondering*) Unfortunately I figured this out with the last seam I did! Would have made my sewing that much easier ... but next time I know.

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Using striped fabric when sewing for the first time is not necessarily a very clever choice!!! It can help you to sew straight lines - as long as you are sewing in the same direction as the stripes - and as long as you are able to actually follow the stripes. Other than that - it will just really show of the seams that are NOT straight! Great! :-/

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If the instruction tells you something you should do - JUST DO IT! Even if you don't understand WHY you have to do it that way and think it would be better another way!
Of course at some point I did not unterstand the instruction - I did not do exactly what it said - and I figured out LATER why the instruction was right and I was wrong! :-/

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It is definitely worth alot to invest in a very good marker to mark your pattern on the fabric. I bought some really crap one. (Just didn't know it would not be good.) Makes sewing life an absolute hell! Therefore next step before I sew anything else - find a really good fabric marker!!!

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Oh - and of course there is kind of a "Murphys law" of sewing:
"No matter how often you practice sewing a buttonhole on a scrap bit of fabric and it turns out totally fine - as soon as you do it on the actual garment you're making, it will DEFINITELY be too small!"
I had to use some real force to push the button through the hole! Lucky me, that we won't have to open the button again!

Here a few more pictures:




I know that the photo above is out of focus. But it shows the nice fall of the dress from the side ... so I still included it.

Well, my daughter had alot fun modelling ... until she slipped in the muddy grass and fell. Nothing really happened but she didn't want to model anymore and I wasn't allowed to take any more photos.