Dress with midriff yoke

I think I am finally finished with lesson 4 of my craftsy darts and seamlines drafting course.  This part of the lesson was to draft "bust gathers with yoke".  I have had Vogue 1183, a Kay Unger dress with beautiful seamlines, in my pattern stash for a long time now, but the thought of fitting the pattern has put me off sewing it up (that and all the other dress patterns in my collection).  It is easier for me to draft to fit than to modify a commercial pattern to fit...all that twisting in the mirror...so I decided to use this pattern as my inspiration for a dress with yoke.

My pattern is not exactly  the same as the Kay Unger pattern.  I have less seam lines in the bodice.  I continued the vertical seaming into the front skirt.  I did not cross my fronts as much as the dress on the model, as I wanted to make more of a feature of the crossover.  My yoke stops at the natural waist, rather than dip down below it.  This sounds like a long list of differences, but I did copy the elements I wanted and am happy with the outcome.

The fabric is a cotton sateen from Spotlight.  I bought it as a backup for my daughter's primary school graduation last year, but she did not like it.  Now that I have made it up, I think she is wishing that she had bagged this fabric for something, even if not for her dress.  Never mind, I have quite a sizable remnant that I am sure she will find a use for.  The colours in the print are especially fun, even if the fabric quality is not so great.

With these large scale prints, I always have difficulty deciding where to place my pattern pieces at the cutting out stage (especially as I am normally quite stingy with my fabric purchases and don't have a lot of room for maneuver).  For this one, it would have been better not to have that white area cross my belly...it looks much worse in some of the photos that I have decided not to share!  I did re-cut the yoke so that it wasn't white as well.

I did a pretty good job of pattern matching through the skirt seams.  This is great from a pattern matching point of view, but it means that the seam lines do not feature as much as they would in a plain fabric.

I am really pleased that there is no gaping at the front.  I have not pinned or tacked the cross-over in place.  I wore this to work last week, and had no problems

I did go to try a belt on with this dress, as per the model on the pattern cover, but I could not find a belt.  I must have got rid of them all in my Kon Marie moment.