McCalls 6956,

Hey ya'll, I find myself once again begging your forgiveness for being over ambitious and not following through on my plan. Early in June I laid out some major plans for summer sewing and then a few things happened that waylaid me. The first was the sewing I've been doing for the community match portion of the Super Online Sewing Match II, the second was the end of our theatre's summer season being way busier than the first half, and the third was getting some bad news about a family member's health. I want to say that on the last not they are in good spirits and fighting hard and we have reason to be hopeful. All of my excuses were a long drawn out way of saying sorry.

I have learned that I am not making plans anymore. Well it's not that I'm not making them but I am not going to share them in the same way. Over planning my sewing has lead me to lose ambition for projects I was formerly excited for. No one needs that, least of all me. That said I did finish a few of the projects I set out to accomplish and I am blogging about them now.

The first is McCall's 6956. This dress is great! As soon as I saw it I was in love with view B. The way they used the stripes was awesome and I had a beautiful mint green seersucker that was just calling out to become this dress. 

The construction of this dress is pretty straight forward and I found the directions and markings really clear and well done. One adjustment that I decided to make was to add a shaped bra panel out of felt to the cups of the dress. This is one of the easiest hacks/alts to make. and I found that it really paid off it the fit and structure of the dress.

All you need to do is trace the bra cup pieces onto the felt. Then take a ruler and mark 5/8" in from the outermost marking. This will be your cut line. Transfer the notches to this new line. What you're doing is removing the seam allowance. The reason you would do this is because you are not really going to seam these together in the same way you will the exterior and lining pieces.

You're going to use a zigzag stitch to put these together. What you'll do is sort of line up the pieces and the notches, butting the two pieces up next to each other. You can see this really well in the picture below because I marked the notch with a sharpie.

Next all you do is to zigzag stitch along the point where you've butted the seams up to one another. Make sure you backstitch at the beginning and the end. As you continue down the length of the seam you just want to continue to move the two pieces together so that they are caught up and stitched so that they snuggle right up to one another.

Then when they come out of the machine they create a sweet little shaped cup to line the top of your dress without creating super bulky seams. I only did the front bra pieces then I flatlined the shaped cups to the lining for the top of the dress.

I had intended on making my version strapless, however being a well endowed woman I quickly realized when I put it on that the dress needed straps. However because I added the shaping to the cups I did find that I did not really need to wear a bra with it. Score! No peeking bra or bra straps creeping out. Now since I did not add the straps before I finished the dress I had to add them on after. 

This afforded me the opportunity that I don't think I would've taken to set the straps really close to the center back of the dress. I am really glad that I did. I wore this dress to an opening night party, I felt secure the whole night, and my straps never slipped once.

This dress is a new and absolute favorite. Once again my dress form is now larger than I am so the back doesn't close, but look at her, she's a beaut!

I am going to try to be better with my blog but I'm not making promises anymore. Life got in my way the last few weeks and there's not much I could do about it. My sewn items are awesome and I am super happy with the work that I have been doing. I look forward to sharing more of them with you all!