Walkaway Dress vs. 60s Full Skirt Dress

Having gone a bit sock mad this week - more about that later - and at a temporary standstill due to lack of yarn for my Cavalier, I decided to spend this beautiful day working with something a little more summery than chunky woolly yarn.  So I pulled out my box of vintage patterns, had a little rummage, and settled on Butterick's 1956 Walkaway Dress.  

The perfect project for a day like today, this dress is so quick and simple to make that you can really get through it leisurely, stopping for coffee breaks in the garden... marvelling at the first crop of cherries on the little tree... planning other projects... and still have a great dress to show for it in less than a day.  I wanted to show off this beautiful ribbon trim I've been saving for a few years so I used a very simple off-white muslin for the main body of the dress.  I also reduced the volume of the skirt making it less flouncy, and I hemmed the edges as opposed to bias binding (bias binding gets on my nerves...).  

This isn't the first time I've made the Walkaway Dress, and I am always amazed at how different the same dress can be just by changing the fabric - see Walkaway Dress version 1 below, which I made for my 25th birthday using a pale pink Shantung silk, with a very subtle arabesque print and bound with a black scalloped trim.

Walkaway Dress version 1.

Being such a lovely day, I asked my lovely neighbour-model-babysitter Jess to come over so I could photograph a couple of my dresses on her, which brings me nicely to something I'm very excited about...

When I was at school (not even 10 years ago), Proms were the stuff of American high-school movies.  No such fun for us Brit-teens.  We all felt very deprived.  But now, it seems, (10 years too late - spoken through teeth gritted with envy), the Brit Prom has caught on.  Obviously the best part about Prom is the finding of the perfect dress, so you can imagine how excited and flattered I am that Jess has asked me to make her Prom Dress!!!  After discussing what she wanted and looking through my patterns, she was torn between the Walkaway Dress and the 60s dress I made last Monday, but after trying on versions of the two dresses I've already made, we're almost decided... Fabric shopping on Friday!

Up to the minute Prom Dress (PD) updates to continue throughout June...