Spotty Dress - A lesson in thinking things through to the end

Do you remember this spotty fabric I bought a while back that I was planning to make into Simpicity 2886? Well I have finally made the dress and it's gorgeous. However, before sharing the finished dress with you I wanted to share the teeny-tiny mistakes I made during it's construction.

When I was cutting out the fabric I decided to learn from my (minor) regrets of recent garments and have a go at matching the print on some of the seams. I decided to go with matching the pockets and the centre back for this dress.

So after cutting out the skirt piece I traced the pattern of spots onto the pocket piece and positioned it carefully. And successfully matched one pocket beautifully... But didn't think through that I should have cut out the two pocket pieces separately so one is matched and the other not quite so. Whoops! Mistake number 1.

(Left: unmatched pocket, Right: matched pocket)

Learning from my mistake I then cut one of the back pieces and painstakingly positioned the second one so that it matched beautifully at the bottom of the centre back seam (the seam is curved so it was impossible to match the whole thing).

(Perfectly matched centre back seam)

I was very chuffed by my perfect matching (yes, chuffed), but then while I was sewing the bodice up I realised that when making the muslin I hadn't worked out my exact centre back seam, I had figured I could work it out on the real thing once I had it on (as I hadn't read through far enough to realise that it had a side zip rather than a centre back one). Thus, I still had to take in the centre back seam (a couple of inches at some parts), so now my beautifully matched centre back seam is no longer beautifully matched. Boo!

Oh well, you live you learn. The finished dress is pretty awesome, so it's OK. Stay tuned for photos of the finished dress.