Red and Green, Cotton Sateen

A couple of months ago, I was contacted by Organic Cotton Plus with an offer to try two yards of one of their fabrics.  What I was expecting to find on their site was a lot of solid colored fabrics.

Well, it turns out, there are also a lot of really lovely prints to be found there.  After perusing the website, I had it narrowed down to four choices.  My final decision had a lot to do with the fact that this ginkgo print cotton sateen is 110” wide!  I figured I could squeeze a dress out of two yards of fabric with that much width to help me along.

Once I had chosen the fabric, I decided that I wanted to make a shirtwaist dress, so I pulled out BurdaStyle 7179.  I have been wanting to try this design for some time, and I thought it would work nicely in a cotton sateen, provided that I could fit all the pieces on two yards of fabric.

To give myself another challenge, I decided that I wanted to graft the sleeves of Vogue 8193 on the BurdaStyle bodice - sleeves that eat up a massive amount of fabric.

Since I was not exactly sure how the combo would turn out, a muslin was in order.

That went quite well, so I cut into my cotton sateen.  This fabric is really, really lovely.  The red dye did bleed quite a bit on the first wash, and the silvery white ginkgo leaves picked up a bit of a rose hue from the water, but I actually like the way it turned out.

I used leftover cotton scraps as a sew-in interfacing.

And I even used up a few fusible interfacing scraps while working on my bound buttonholes.

I really never get tired of making these!

I have tried making friends with machine made buttonholes, but so far, we just don't trust one another.

So for now, I am going to stick with the old fashioned technique.  It has served me well, and I don't plan on abandoning it anytime soon.

And, of course, I had to sneak a bit of rayon seam binding in there for good measure.

About half way through this dress, I had a terrible feeling that I made a mistake pairing the fabric to the silhouette.  I stepped away from the project for a while, and spent my creative hours working on my knitting.

At some point, I got sick of looking at the partially completed pieces on my sewing table, and finally finished the darn thing.

Turns out, I love it!

I am also beginning to like these covered button kits with the mold.  In the past, I have had some bad luck - particularly with the tiny sizes.  This time around, I added a drop of glue (gasp!) to the back piece before sticking the two pieces together which seems to have worked very well.  I think that these buttons have a slightly smoother edge than the version with the teeth that snap into place.

I am not a complete convert yet, but I will be giving these another try at some point.

And as luck would have it, the perfect buckle was stashed away, which was the perfect finishing touch for this dress!

[Disclosure:  The fabric for this project was sent to me by Organic Cotton Plus, but the opinions written here are my own.]