A Reto-esque Spring Outfit

What's more spring/summer like than navy and white. Today I'm showing a dress/jacket set which to me announces the end of winter clothes and hello Spring. Here it is.

The fabric is a cotton/poly blend knit with no lycra so it just barely stretches. And I know that crosswise stripes are suppose to make me look wider but in real life they don't really do that. Just in the photo.

The dress is yet another version of McCall's  6355 which has become a favorite TNT pattern for me. I've stuck with View D because I feared the sleeveless version would be too bare.

 Here I'm wearing it to my oldest sister's 70th birthday party.* I'm the youngest of four sisters)

At first I was just going to make the dress with sleeves, but I thought I'd get more wear out of a sleeveless version and decided to make a little jacket to wear with it to church. For this I used McCalls 6708 View A but longer.The neckline was much higher than it shows on the pattern drawing so I had to lower the neck to add the band.


My fabric isn't very stretchy and the neckband wouldn't lay against my neck on the jacket although it worked fine for the dress. I thought I'd add little tucks a la Marci Tilton and that turned out OK, I think.

One challenge I faced for the jacket was matching the stripes to the dress. It took some manoeuvring but I managed quite well, I think.

For closures, I've decided against buttons so I don't have to worry about buttonholes . I'm going to use these white plastic snaps instead. I got lazy and will sew those on later.

 

I really enjoyed the process of making this outfit and I'm more than ready to start wearing warm weather clothes but it's so darn cold here! Ugh!!!!

 I hope you found time to sew this weekend. more later from