True Bias - Lodo Dress

Following with the theme of sewalongs - Kelli from True Bias recently started a mini-sewalong to her latest release, the Lodo Dress.
 

FYI - the glowing whiteness above is a British person coming out of winter after not seeing the sun for some time. Do not be alarmed. I am also misleadingly wearing sunglasses - it is neither hot nor sunny (yet we keep the faith). However, sunglasses means not wading through 3000 pictures for one where my eyes are not shut! I digress...

As soon as I saw this pattern hit social media it was a winner in my eyes! That is my idea of a perfect dress - clean, simple, comfortable but oooohhh such beautiful little details to make it remarkable. (Those woven facings!)

Within minutes I had the PDF downloaded and taped up - which FYI took all of 5 minutes as the pieces are already printed to fit each other ie no cutting involved!

The dress has a couple of options - a very classy looking midi which looks beautiful in black and also a shorter version without back walking slits. As much as I love the midi version and will no doubt make it - I'm on a stash busting mission and only had enough fabric for a shorter version! As fate would have it, I found a leftover piece of striped ponte (bought from Minerva Crafts) from my Sointu project which was the exact size of the pattern! (Seriously, when does that ever happen)

I made the dress in little 15 minute bursts over the course of a few days but you could whip this bad boy up in a couple of hours start to finish I reckon.

The dress does have a back seam however I omitted this in the interests of not making stripe-matching life more difficult than it needed to be.

Using the chart I cut a size 8 bust, 10 at the waist and 14 at the hip and suprisingly it worked without looking crazy curvy as sometimes happens. I think for next time I would go to a 10 at the bust just to give a little more comfort room and avoid slight pull lines at the arms which occurred.

Let's move on to THE best feature of this stretch dress - the non-stretch facings!! The arms and neckline are stable and don't need any give so Kelli as designed this lovely feature of a woven bindings that sit perfectly against the dress. What I adore about this is that you have a secret little design on the inside - a personal touch which anyone else will rarely see but you know is there :)

Again on a stash busting mission - I used some ladybird print cotton to make the facings (and turned the rest into bias binding). Pretty insides!!

Needless to say this pattern has also reached my top favourites list - now if only there was enough fabric for one in every colour.....

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