Today our Washington Dress pieces become a dress! Nearly there.

Turn your bodice right sides out, and your skirt inside out, like so:

Pop the bodice into the skirt – you’ll match up the raw edge of the bodice waist and the yoke waist, and the right side of the bodice will be facing the right side of the skirt. Pin around the waist, making sure the side seams are matched up, the center front and back, and all the notches.

Now you have two options for attaching the elastic – you can either pin it now to the waistline, and sew through all three layers (bodice, skirt, elastic). Or as I have done here, you can sew the bodice and skirt first, and then attach the elastic – in my case, I sewed the bodice and skirt with my serger, then used my sewing machine to attach the elastic to the serging using a zig zag stitch (I find this easier because my serger doesn’t play nicely with elastic).

And now it looks like a dress! Depending on the thickness of your fabrics, you may want to press the waistline of the dress up or down – my ponte really really wants to stick up, so I pressed it up.

Turn it right sides out, and here’s what you have! If the waistline is wobbling you might want to go back in and even up the stitching.

Onto the final straight: hemming! Come back on Friday. Any questions today?

Are you going to be joining the Washington Dress Party on January 4th? You have some time to sew during the holiday break (if you’re somewhere that has one!). There’ll be awesome prizes 😀