The little dress in progress

I've made progress on the baby dress in the last week.  I gathered the top and sewed the outside half of the yoke pieces on.  I also sewed the inside pieces of the yoke on at the neck line.

I haven't made gathers by hand before.  At first, I was a little stressed about making the gathers perfectly even, and then I remembered that the key difference between formal pleats and informal gathers is that gathers aren't expected to be perfectly even. Once I figured that out, the process went pretty quickly.

I wasn't crazy about using polyester binding on the armholes and didn't want to spend the time making bias binding.  So I sewed a narrow baby hem.  While I've read in plenty of places that a curved opening flares when hemmed, this is really only true when working by machine.  Sewing by hand with a relatively thin fabric, the hemmed armholes came out nice and smooth.



The next steps are the back opening and the bottom ruffle.  I don't have enough of the gold fabric to make the ruffle quite as ruffle-y as the pattern calls for.  So I may substitute another fabric. We'll see.