I made my first Colette Laurel dress back in the Summer – I’m a bit behind with blogging my finished makes! I say this is my first because I have already made a second, and I have plans for more.

I made the size zero dress, with short sleeves. This was made from some cheap polycotton which I got as a remnant from Rolls and Rems on Holloway Road. I think I paid about £6.99 and got probably 3 metres. The fabric is quite thin, so I decided to underline it with a sheet I had lying around. This does make it quite warm, which is great for the Winter, but a bit sucky for the Summer! This was my first time underlining and I found it pretty straight forward – just cut out everything twice and sew the inside and outside fabrics together around the edges, within the seam allowances, and then sew the doubled pieces together as normal.

I used all french seams, as I usually do these days – I do like a pretty inside!

(I should really have ironed this before I took pictures!)

I did have to make one fitting change. As the pattern was drafted, I couldn’t get the sleeves over my arms. I’ve had this with other patterns, so I think I might have big arms compared to the rest of me! I tried reducing the seam allowances to 1cm but that wasn’t enough, I still couldn’t bend my arms. I had to redraft the sleeve pattern with an extra 2cm on each side, to give me some extra room. Has anyone else had this issue? On this or another pattern (btw, this isn’t the only pattern where I’ve had this happen!).

I had a 12in invisible zip in my stash so I used that instead of the 22in one requested in the pattern. I used the tutorial on the Colette website to help me put this in – I always forget how to do invisible zips!

Check out my stripe matching! I’m definitely getting better at it!

Stripe matched side seam – not quite as good as the back.

Pretty much invisible pockets:

You can almost see here that the pockets, which I didn’t underline are see through.

There’s a bit of pulling around the arm area, as you can see here. I needed to lower the bust darts too on the second version. I think I need to give myself more room on the arm holes as well as in the sleeves, then the pulling would hopefully go away.  But in short, I love this dress!