Little Black Dress, Couture Style

I am currently enrolled in a  couture sewing class at Mesa Community College.  One definition of couture is high-fashion designing and dressmaking.  I am learning a lot of techniques used by the high fashion designers and Paris couture houses in this class.  It involves a lot of handwork with less or no work on the sewing machine.

The first and major project that we are taking on is making ourselves a "little black dress".  We started out making a muslin mock-up in order to ensure that the pattern would fit us properly.  Some people in my class had more fitting issues to fix than others.  Thankfully I didn't have too many.

The pattern that I am using for my class is a Vogue pattern, number V8633.  I know this is probably not what you would think of when you hear the phrase "little black dress", but since I am in my mid-40s I decided that I really didn't need a dress for clubbing and things like that, but more for work parties, church functions, etc.

We started out with the muslins, then our next step was to cut out a black silk organza to use as our underlining.  Once that was done we cut out the fashion fabric using the organza as our pattern pieces.  We basted those together on the one inch stitching line.  At the beginning of the project we added 3/8 inch to our seam allowance in order to have a one inch seam allowance that would be easier to deal with in case of tricky fitting issues.

As the piece was sewn we did a catch stitch on all of the seam allowance for a clean and nicely laying seam.  I've only completed the top portion of the dress and now I'll be moving on to the bottom portion of the dress.  I'll keep you updated!