My Valerie

Here's my version of Valerie. I'm going to put my hand up here and confess to making a total wadder that preceded this version. You know when you love a fabric so much and your head says "that fabric's probably not going to work for this pattern" but you go ahead and do it anyway? Yeah, that. Anyway, moving on...

 

My subsequent (and infinitely more successful) version is made up in a rayon georgette that goes by the name of Shattered Dreams. Look, it even has mysterious looking women all over it. I don't normally go for faces on fabrics but I have inexplicably loved this one ever since it arrived. I'm neither experienced nor proficient when it comes to dealing with lightweight fabrics so I was pretty careful during the cutting stage (read: used an insane amount of pins when attaching pattern to fabric). It all came together very easily but I did have some issues with the binding. Because the fabric was so light, it moved very easily during bias-cutting stage. This made for some pretty irregular cutting which resulted in my first round of strips being too thin, which resulted in me cutting out another lot that were a quarter inch wider (but next time, I'm doing this - freakin' genius! Thanks for the tip Di).

The other tricky aspect, for me, was joining the binding tail ends. Now Colette has done this tutorial on attaching and joining the double fold binding (which is great, boss!) but if you're having trouble and it's all a bit fiddly and you're not clear on exactly which direction you need to stitch, here's my tip. Pin your binding to wherever it's going, measure and mark your binding join points, unpin the binding completely from your neckline/armhole, do a visual check to make sure you'll be sewing your join in the right direction (and not twisting the binding in the process), and THEN sew your join (I'll just add in here the vilene tip is a pretty damn good one).  After that's done, attach your finished loop of binding to your armhole/neckline and complete the sewing process. Man, that explanation feels (and looks!) a bit wordy so I hope it made sense. In a nutshell, I just found it a lot easier to join my binding ends together when it was completely detached from the armhole/neckline.

I love Valerie. I do. But my favourite part about her? The gathered dart...