2018 Dress a Month Sewalong: #2 Hotpatterns Weekender Chameleon Dress

I've wanted to make this dress for a long while with some cotton faux suede that has been in my stash for over a decade. Wowza that's a long time. Finally, thanks to the Dress a Month Sewalong over on the Stitcher's Guild site, I got motivated. 

The design elements that drew my eye were 

• the gently curved high-low waistline design feature echoed in the high-low skirt hem.
• The deep facing on the skirt hem (3.5 inches) that did not allow for the wrong side of the fabric to show when the back dip area is viewed from the front--yay! (Seeing the wrong side of the fabric at the back dip of a high-low hem hurts my eyes sometimes.)
• the on-seam pockets (a boon for any dress) 
• the V-neckline (which looks best on me)
• the 3/4 length sleeves with notched hem, 
• all of the great topstitching embellishment. 

 All in all, for my taste, it appeared to be a winner of a dress design.

More photos:

 Note: the dress is shown on one of my backup dressforms, not sized to me perfectly, so the fit may look a little off. My good dressform is being used for tissue-fitting my newest project-in-progress so I had to use a stand-in for these photos.

Fabric: Cotton "suede", prewashed. Origin unknown--maybe Hancock Fabrics back in the day? It's happy to be out of my stash and into the light of day.

Pattern: Hotpatterns HP1178 Weekender Chameleon Dress 

This dress is pretty easy to make. Once I got the bodice fitted to my satisfaction, which didn't take much, it was an easy cut and sew. The topstitching took time, but is well worth the effort in the finished look. 

There appears to be an error in the pattern's directions for inserting the invisible zipper (directing it to be sewn to the wrong side of the fabric, not the right side), but since I've inserted a million of them and had no plans to use one for this dress, it made no difference. 

Also, the with the wide V-front neckline and slightly dropped back neckline, one could get away with no back closure, slipping the dress on over the head.

Method: I serged the raw edges of each pattern piece with a 3-Thread Wide setting on my Elna serger. When the seams were completed (2.9 mm stitch length), they were pressed open and topstitched with a Saddle Stitch, which, on my Janome 8900, is 
D97
Stitch Width setting: 4.5
Stitch Length setting: 5.0 
The designation sort of looks like this.

and here's a closeup on the dress:

Pattern Modifications: 

Armhole: The armhole was raised 1 inch for a sleeker silhouette.  
 
Back opening: Instead of the invisible zipper called for in the pattern, I chose to add an exposed zipper, using the Full Monty Exposed Zipper tutorial from the Craftsy website. 

The cute zipper came from zprz.com and is the Mocha Zebra Print Tape #5 Metallic Coil Zipper:

Lining: The dress is unlined. The neckline, sleeve and skirt hems are finished with extra wide facings.

I haven't worn the dress yet--I finished it just before we left on a 10 day trip so it's been decorating my sewing room on a dress form in the interim, waiting for photos to be taken. So with this blog post, the photos were taken and the dress can now be worn. Done and done.

On to dress #3 for the year!