Craftsy square neck dress

I am making my way through the dresses in Suzy Furrer's craftsy course "Patternmaking + design: creative necklines".  This is the fourth dress I have made - I haven't actually worn the second and third dresses yet and so have not got around to photographing them yet.  This queue jumper is a fitted dress with a square neckline and an a-line skirt.

 I didn't actually muslin the skirt after I drafted it and it is not as sticky out a-line as I was expecting.  The dress also ended up a little closer fitting than I expected.  Theoretically, I have included about 4 cm of ease at the waist, bust and hips, but it doesn't feel like it.

The fabric is a cotton drill from Tessuti.  I wish I had cut it so that less of the green colour was near my face, but I wasn't really thinking about it when I was cutting.

 

This drafting exercise was about drafting a neckline with corners...I think I have hit my corners pretty sharply!  I don't have a necklace that works very well with this neckline though.

 

The back neckline also has corners.  I got carried away and added corners to the back armhole as well.  I used an invisible zip.  I would have preferred a lapped zipper for this design, but I didn't have a normal zipper the right colour and length and I don't have good quality zips available to me locally.  I recently bought a new sewing machine (more on that in a later post) and the invisible zip foot that came with it works pretty well, which I am happy about.

 Now that I have made 4 dresses as part of the course, as well as a Burda dress that I also have not shown you, and an emergency dress for my daughter, I am getting quicker at making dresses.  For this one, I drafted the bodice and made up a muslin in one short "school day"  and drafted the skirt, cut out and sewed the dress on a second "school day".  Admittedly, it is not a complicated dress.  I am trying to put aside one school day a week to work on the drafting course, which should equate to drafting and sewing a pattern every 2 weeks.  However, family stuff gets in the way and there are always other things to do on my drafting day...looking back, it has taken 16 weeks to make the last 3 dresses instead of the planned 6 weeks.  Still, I am excited that I can finally make fitted dresses that do fit....feels like I have achieved a very big item on my sewing bucket list...one that I was worried would forever elude me.

Do you have a sewing bucket list?  For the big stuff, not the every season want-to-sew stuff?  What's on your list?