Green December: Anna Dress

After my first By Hand London Anna dress, I was eager to make another and to use up some fabulous Amy Butler fabric that I got at a swap earlier in the year (thanks to Carys for grabbing it for me!).  I also thought this would make a good first entry for the Sewcialists’ Green December!

Anna with gathered skirt – front view

I only had 2m of this fabric, so I wasn’t able to make the Anna quite as designed.  I therefore narrowed the facings rather a lot, and made a gathered skirt rather than the intended panelled skirt.  This also had the added benefit of not needing to worry about pattern matching along the skirt seam lines.  For the gathered skirt, I cut two rectangles of fabric – one on the fold for the front skirt, and then two separate for the back.  I used the whole width of the fabric and the length was about 65cm.

Back view – slightly blurry – sorry!

My overlocker was threaded up with red at the time, and initially I couldn’t be bothered to change it, so I used the turned-and-stitched seam finish for nearly all of my seams, except the gathered skirt waist seam which in the end I overlocked with white thread as I needed white for my next project anyway.  I must say in general I much, much prefer to use my overlocker because it’s neat, tidy, professional-looking and EASY!

Seam finishes

I really loved the finished dress and I’ve worn it loads.  It really feels like a ‘me’ dress.  I love the green colour, it’s a good contrast to my red hair and brings out the green in my eyes.  Plus, it’s really comfy, so yay!  I haven’t got many photos because as soon as I made it, it didn’t hang around on Delilah, I started wearing it straight away!  In fact its first outing was to a Gin Parlour in Manchester, with two of my best friends from home.  One of them was in this picture, but I didn’t think she would appreciate me posting her on the internet 🙂

Anna’s first outing – cocktail night at the Gin Parlour!

PS. I mentioned that my co-blogger Julia had bought this pattern and I’ve seen a photo of one of her versions and seen the other one in real life…and let me tell you they are both BEAUTIFUL!