Black and Rainbow Shirtdress (McCall’s 6696)

Welcome to my first post! I’d been hemming and hawing about starting a blog for ages, and today I decided to finally just do the thing. This blog will likely be a scattered collection of all the different things I like to make (clothes, quilts, baked goods, music). If you want to read more about me, check out the About Me page for more details.

This dress I made a little over two years ago and the only reason I remember that is because I wore it to my younger sister’s university graduation ceremony. The pattern is the ever-popular McCall’s 6696 shirtdress, and this is the second or third version of it that I’d made. My first version turned out horribly big because I seemed to be determined not to remember that Big 4 patterns have a strange amount of ease built into them, so I went down a size for my subsequent versions. I was really big into using quilting cottons to make ALL THE THINGS when I first starting sewing (I don’t think I’m alone in this). This dress is made out of one that I picked up at Atlantic Fabrics, a local chain. I think one of the reasons I still am tempted to buy all the quilting cottons for clothing is because the colour selection is just so much better! I love rainbow things and bright colours and bold patterns, and it often seems like garment fabrics are either super kitschy and dated and made out of polester, or made of beautiful fibres in muted classic tones. Which, don’t get me wrong, I like sometimes, but that’s really not my jam.

This dress has so many flaws. You may be wondering why I’m pointing this out, especially if you know me in real life. I am firmly in the camp of “good enough” – definitely no perfectionism to be found here. I still wear this dress regularly because I know no one else will notice all the things I think are wrong with it, but there are definitely things that would be much improved if I had made this dress yesterday instead of when I was earlier on in my sewing journey. I didn’t overlap the button bands far enough and the bottom one always peeks out. I have multiple noticeable tucks in the cap of both sleeves. I was trying to remove the gathering from the original pattern in the back bodice, and didn’t know enough to get it completely out of the whole thing so there’s still some gathering at the bottom back above the waistband. You can’t see this but I pinked all of the seam allowances inside, and I now know that I hate that finish because you can see the bits of fraying (I keep having to pluck rogue threads from dangling down out of my sleeve hems every time I put it on).

The point of all this is not to make you think I’m a terrible sewist or that I think we need to itemize all the mistakes we made. My point is just that at the time, I was so proud of this dress because I made the darn thing and it fit and looked like how I envisioned! And I’m still proud of it because even though my skills have developed, this dress is a representation of my abilities at the time. No one is magically good at things, some of just get absurdly obsessed with something and spend hours and hours and hours doing that thing until one day you notice you’re less clueless than before.

I’ve never taken any classes on sewing clothes, I just bumbled along and relied heavily on Google and YouTube and my mum’s logic and wisdom. My next post will be about something more recently made, but I wanted to start out with this to show that mistakes are inevitable but it doesn’t mean you can’t wear that thing proudly anyway!