1950s Dress: Seam Binding

Part One · Part Three

I've made fast progress on the 1950s Butterick dress. The first dress I made was based on a newer pattern. This one was slightly different - all the pieces were pre-cut, the marks were all holes punched into the paper, and there was no ink. I much prefer this than cutting out the pattern and marking everything down. The holes allowed me to easily mark darts and notches.

Here you can see roughly the colour of the fabric. Last time I neglected to mark out most of the small dots (which ended up being a pain as they are actually important). Since the pattern had holes it was easy to chalk everything up.

I decided to do some seam binding for this dress (it's always good to learn something new). I was pretty nervous until I got started. I thought about pinning the whole thing but I'm sure it would be too time-consuming so just ran with it.

After getting my head around how the bias binding actually fits around the seam, it was pretty easy from there. As long as the side you're most likely to see looks good, it's all good!

Here's the result! A little wrinkly (probably due to too much pulling on the binding) but it's a really tidy way to finish up the seams. Unfortunately I only got five metres of binding (thought it would be enough, hahaha) so I'll have to get some more if I want to finish all the seams this way.