Green December: Another Anna!

I have another By Hand London Anna dress to show you today!  This one has yet another skirt variation – I had a decent length of this map fabric from Goldhawk Road so I decided to draft a circle skirt for this version of the Anna dress, and I made the higher neck version rather than the v-neck this time.

My third By Hand London Anna dress

To make the circle skirt, I measured my waist, divided it by four and drew a rectangle measuring ¼ of my waist wide and my desired skirt length (I went for 70cm to give me plenty to play with).

Rectangle measuring a quarter of my waist wide and my preferred skirt length long. I then drew straight lines from top to bottom to cut along.

I then used the slash and spread method which I learned on my pattern cutting course to make the circle skirt pattern, and once that was done I added the seam allowance.

Circle skirt pattern – slashed and spread and filled in!

At this point I realised that I still wouldn’t have enough fabric for a full circle skirt, so I put that full-circle pattern aside and drafted another pattern for a half-circle skirt instead.  I’m pretty pleased with this work because now I have both patterns ready for future use!  In fact, I’ve already used the full circle skirt pattern for a different dress 🙂

I spent a lot of time very carefully cutting the fabric to ensure that the pattern on the fabric would match up exactly at the waistline where the bodice meets the skirt.  So much so, that I paid very little attention to matching the pattern at the centre back seam, and I ended up with a massive mismatch!!  The stupid thing is that this mismatch is far more noticeable than a waistline mismatch would have been…oh well!

Matching up at the waist seam

Totally not matching up at centre back! The waistline does match though…

The dress came together very quickly and easily – no wonder everyone loves this pattern!  And I’m totally thrilled with the finished result.  Oh, and as this is green fabric, I’m going to include it in the Sewcialist’s Green December collection!  This will probably be my last entry for Green December though – I do have plans for another green dress but I’ve got lots of other stuff on the go at the moment!

Bodice view

One last note: in order to be able to hem my (half) circle skirt more easily, I used Gillian’s excellent tip: gather the bottom edge with your overlocker, which will make it easier to ease in the excess fabric when turning up the hem!

Hemming…the easy way!

All of the seams inside are overlocked, so it looks very nice and neat.

Nice and neat on the inside 🙂

I’m really pleased with how the dress turned out, but I haven’t worn it yet!  I need to go to some sort of Geography convention or something!!!