Frocktober – Sew With Us – Named Dakota – Day 5

Wow, can you believe it? Today’s the last day of the Named Dakota sew-with-us series! Have you been sewing along with me? How’s your dress coming along?

If you missed them, Day 1 was all about assembling the pattern and cutting our fabric, Day 2 was constructing the bodice, Day 3 was the skirt and pockets (pockets!), and Day 4 was the sleeves.

Today, we’re going to be doing the finishing-off details. So a nice, easy day to end with! Simply hemming our skirt, and adding buttons to the sleeve cuffs.

Heck, chances are you’ve already added the buttons to your sleeve cuffs. (Unless you’re like me, and you modified the pattern for short sleeves instead.) If not, why not take a moment to go and add them now?

Hemming the skirt

Right, sleeve cuff buttons all sorted? Excellent! Now for the last thing left to do to finish off our Dakota – hemming the skirt!

You may have noticed when cutting out your fabric or sewing up the skirt that the angle of the skirt panels changed an inch or so up from the base of the skirt. This change in angles is going to make it nice and easy to get a smooth, flat hem turn-up, as the angle for the bottom inch or so matches the angle above it, so when you turn up your skirt hem the width of the skirt edge matches the width of the skirt at the point where you’re going to be stitching it down. Yay! 🙂

As I mentioned back in Day 2, I like to leave finishing the edge of my skirt pieces until last, so I can overlock / serge them in one go, which I find gives a much nicer, clean edge as you don’t risk having any sections slightly longer than the section they’re joined to. Although today I’m going to go one step further and use one of my favourite details – I’ll be using some cotton tape for hemming my skirt.

It’s nice and easy to apply – I simply stitch it to the edge of the skirt (onto the right side of the fabric), making sure the width of the tape covers the raw edges of the fabric and stitching right on the edge of the tape that’s furtherest away from the edge of the skirt.

Then, I turn the hem up as per usual, and stitch it down right on the edge of the tape that I didn’t stitch when attaching it to the skirt in the first place.

The result? A nice, clean hem, with a fun pop of colour on the inside of my dress. (Yes, I have a thing for colour, in case you haven’t been able to guess yet!)

And we’re done!

Give your Dakota a final press, and you’re all finished! Yay! 😀

Here’s my finished dress:

I wish I could show you what it looks like on, but I won’t be able to fit into it for a few weeks yet (baby bump and all that, after all). I’ve had a lot of fun sewing it up though, and I’m really looking forward to wearing it this summer!

Are you planning on entering the Dakota sewing contest? You’ve got until 24:00 UTC on 18 October to get your blog post about your Dakota up on The Monthly Stitch. If your garment is chosen as the winner by the lovely ladies who designed the Dakota pattern, you’ll win your choice of any two PDF patterns from Named. Which is a pretty awesome prize, really! (Seriously, go check out the huge range of patterns to choose from.)

I hope you had fun following along with me as I made up my Dakota dress! Next up, Juliet will be taking us through sewing up the Giselle dress by Kate & Rose. Yay!