Making a Wrap Dress // A Simple Retro Style

Is it Halloween yet? Can I put out the pumpkins? What are our thoughts? Hello there and welcome back to the Closet Historian and back to my sewing room for another project. Today I'll be showing you how I made the wrap fronted dress from the Verity lookbook recently. You may have gotten a glimpse of this and of course that dark moody green lighting because when it comes to the lookbooks I'm all about the vibes and not about the clarity, but today you'll be seeing this print with a lot more light on it here in the studio as I show you how to add the wrap front to the basic block. Luckily it is just as easy to make the front of a garment wrap as it is to make the back of a garment wrap like you've seen me do a couple of times here now, including for this exact top. I use the wrap back quite a lot but the wrap front is just as simple so let's jump on over to the blue patterning table of doom and get started. All I can think about watching that clip back is that I needed to trim the wick of my candle before I lit it and I would like to apologize to all candle enthusiasts in the audience, especially since that is a fancy candle that I would like to keep looking nice. Anyhow um here we are, I have a full front traced of my bodice block here, I of course uh went ahead and made this pattern first incorrectly uh so this is my second try at it because the first time I made it with the all-in-one sleeve forgetting I wanted to put tulip sleeves on tulip sleeves on this but I just have that traced uh it's the exact same bodice block just with my darts drawn in traced um mirrored along that center front I mean you could just draw the wrap in like that red line you see here boop through that apex on the right hand side of the screen but I'm gonna draw a fun shaped line that of course in this print will be completely lost but that's all right I'm actually just going to cut into this apex uh so that I can close this waist dart on this side um and get a better idea of where I want this purple line to come into the waist here it will be to like one side of the center but it won't go all the way to the side seam here so that's uh just based on this 1940s pattern that I had seen um which is kind of what inspired this project in general was this pattern image here that I cannot find the actual pattern for but this image is floating around on Pinterest but let me go ahead and cut out the rest of this I'm going to make one more adjustment to this again that that's as easy as it as it is uh you just trace a full front and draw in what shape you want for your wrap really but I am going to go ahead and take out a extra half inch of fullness from this angled like wrap area I'm going to close this a half inch and open that up into this side dart over here you can put in the waist too if you want anywhere from the apex um just to help it not gape along that wrap front uh sometimes when you see me do the wrap back you can see I will uh overlap the dart on the other side that we closed first um a little bit more either of those two methods work just want to take out a little bit of extra from that angled line that goes across just because uh the wrap needs to fit a little bit closer to the body than the regular garment does you can have a little bit of space across the chest and the regular garment that needs to be taken away in the wrap I suppose is what I'm trying to say wrap dress 2022 front I'm leaving my darts right where they are on my basic block so the only thing I've done here is make this into a wrap with this bit of a curvy neckline that you would be able to see much more if I used a solid colored fabric now I just have a tracing of my bodice block back here and all I'm going to do is fold that along the center back because I need to cut this on the fold uh I don't need to have a center back seam allowance at all because I won't be putting a zipper in this it'll be full across the back so that's all I need to do with that I can just keep my regular tracing and I just have my tulip sleeve here that you saw me draft in the tulip sleeve video I can put a card up to that video here where I make this tulip sleeve pattern so I'm just grabbing that from my sleeves folder I keep like a bag of sleeves hanging from my cork board next to me over here I know it fits into my bodice pattern so no trouble there now with this piece of paper and my basic skirt block patterns I'm going to go ahead and draft a little bit of a different a-line skirt today you've seen me do this uh method of making an a-line skirt before here on the channel if you've seen my a-line skirt video so I can put a card to that as well but um I'm just going to make a full one of these again because again with the wrap garment we want to have a full front to work with um but I'm going to close the side there's two darts on the front of this well four total two darts on each side I'm going to close the one that's closer to the side seam and I'm going to leave the dart that's closer to the center again this is inspired by 1940s image where it seems they still have a dart or that at least that the skirt is not a full a-line um it's just a little bit flared so I'm just going to use this second dart as my bit of flare and leave the first dart in here and of course this flares right off the edge of my paper because not thinking ahead obviously I'm going to tape on a little bit more paper down here but yeah I'm just going to leave the first dart and then magic swing the second one closed again if you haven't seen me do the like swinging the darts method to make an a-line skirt you can watch in that a-line skirt video how I do the whole thing it's not a straight skirt it's not a full a-line it's kind of in between but I'm going to fold this along the center front here in order to cut this out instead of having to trace the other side I can just fold along the center and have it be mirrored like so cut this out and now I have my sort of half a-line skirt here I'm going to draw in my dart over here that I need on the other side skirt front wrap dress 2022 and I'm actually just going to use this to trace another one so let me just cut some paper out here because I'm going to need two fronts one is going to be a full front and one will be the top wrap layer that will have a little bit of shaping going on so I have two of those now same exact pattern piece just traced that other one drew on the darts again and here you can see the first pattern I made with the all-in-one sleeve same idea you do the same steps to create the wrap on the all-in-one sleeve as you did with the set-in sleeve pattern there and this was the version I created first forgetting I wanted to use tulip sleeves so what a silly human clearly I was distracted this day but I'm just trying to find where on that I had the over overlap end so that I can draw this in and on this side where I'm going to have a little bit of extra shaping on the top layer of my wrap I am going to go ahead and just close this other dart as well um on this side so that this is all smooth and there's a tiny bit of extra flare on the top layer of my skirt and I can just fill that in you can see closing the small dart at the top here opens up a much larger dart into the hemline once again check out the A-line skirt video to know what's going on here or at least watch me do this more thoroughly I suppose but for this top layer of the wrap I thought it would be fun to mirror the neckline shape that I had drawn on the top so I straightened off a line down and then I'm just going to do those same kind of curves that I did on the top of the garment and then I'm going to mirror those in the shape of this overlap I'm using a cotton sateen today it's very uh compared to most fabrics it's quite stiff and on the medium weight side so it's going to hold its shape no problem I'm not worried about this flooping around or flapping around um if you're using a lightweight fabric this kind of a detail probably wouldn't work out on the skirt but with something stiffer like a taffeta um or even a cotton sateen or even maybe a poplin would probably still work I think it should be fine and for this uh pencil skirt back again I'm going to keep my dart that's closer to the center and then I will close the dart that's closer to the side seam here and just swing it open from the pivot point to open up this into another again slight a-line skirt here and just trace in that once it's been pivoted and now we have the back with it still has its dart closer to the center and again I need to cut this on the center back on the fold because it is a wrap dress there is no back opening of any kind and so it's just a slightly curved hem a slightly flared skirt here not the full a-line just gently flared this time there's no rule that says that you have to open up both darts into your a-line do as you wish you know and then I am going to add a stand collar to like half of this neckline sort of like the back and then a little bit forward on this neckline not all the way to the center like front of my bodice because my bodice doesn't go all the way to center front at the neckline so I'm measuring the back neckline three and a half inches or so marking that then measuring how far I want to come forward on that which is only a couple inches maybe two inches and then I'll decide how tall I want that to be what I want the curve to be and here I was thinking oh I need to make that curve where it normally would be so the half inch up tilt of these stand collars actually needs to be at like where it would normally be if it was a shirt collar but yeah it's gonna be fine uh these are actually quite flexible you you know as long as you can even just like do it straight you don't have to have it tipped up at the side like that again if you'd like to see me do a stand collar and actually talk about it properly go ahead and check out my uh more proper tutorial for this sort of thing in my shirt video which I will put a card up to here which I think is my last card I always run out of cards wish I could have more than three I don't think people make videos as long as I do so that's why they don't need as many cards as I do but I reference a lot of my other work because I teach different techniques in every video I suppose um sometimes I repeat them but I try and include at least one new thing in each video and uh I need more cards than they think I do now for the skirt here this is the top layer of the skirt of course I have two fronts I have the full front and then I have this shaped top front so I cut out of the sateen one of each um so they could be layered like a wrap and then here I'm going to go ahead and face the outer uh skirt with a facing made out of some random black cotton muslin I had laying around so I'm just going to face this I would love to fully line this sort of dress but I didn't have enough like lightweight black cotton that was pre-washed ready to go so I'm just going to face the front of this as a way to finish it you could finish something like this again with bias and you'll see me do the other side with bias tape later but I'll use the rest of this black cotton to cut out some bias tape to do so so I'm just going to cut on the 45 degree angle of the fabric of course fabric is woven if you imagine the top of a cherry pie woven over under over under this is a lightweight actually uh this is a cotton wall not a muslin I have black muslin laying around and I have black wall laying around um but I'm just going to cut two inch wide strips on that 45 degree angle to make bias fabric will stretch a bit more on that 45 degree angle even if it's not a stretch fabric there's just more room between the threads when you're pulling it at a 45 degree angle that's why bias is uh very malleable and a little bit stretchy goes around curves really well and that is what I'll be using this for today to hem all of the things going on with my dress I'll show you later let's cut that and set that aside I can get started on some of this other stuff I have my facing here and get started on all these darts I need to sew no problem of course especially in cotton now you may have noticed I have not cut out a facing pattern for this and that is because the front of this I was able to cut out a lining so I will like line the front opening of the wrap uh will be lined by kind of bag lining the front and then flat lining the rest of the front you'll see again when I get to the sewing um and then the back doesn't need a facing at the neckline because it will be up encased into the stand collar so again you'll see all this once I get to sewing but basically that's my very stunted and strange way of trying to say I don't need a facing for this garment you'll see what I mean when I'm sewing it apologies anyway marking my darts with colored pencil of course as usual and then setting those aside next to the machine here's my collar I'm just gonna line that with some lightweight black fabric again so again I just need to sew the top edge of this from a half inch up like so all the way across the top and then I can finish that and have that be fully lined and then we have more darts to do here on the fronts so I have my side darts and waist darts to do on the fronts of course I have a left and right here because it is a wrap um wrap garments do take a little bit more fabric than a regular garment because there are two fronts or if you're doing a wrap on the back there are two backs so for example let's say you need a yard of fabric for the front of a dress a yard of fabric for the back you would need three yards one for the back and two for the front because you need to cut the front twice uh to do is like very basic terminology here um you're going to need more fabric for wrap things so um a lot of times things like when I get fabric for my stash when I buy fabric I usually know what I want to make out of it as in I know I want to make a dress or a blouse or a skirt um so I buy the amount of fabric I need depending on what kind of garment I want to make but sometimes I'll buy two and a half yards of a fabric for a dress and it won't be enough to do a wrap dress um so I will do a different style in general if I know I want to make something that is a wrap dress I'll probably buy three or four yards of fabric just to make sure that I have enough but again just tracing darts marking those and pinning those and um same for the lining and the outer fabric you know doing all this dart marking that I you see me do all the time again with colored pencil as always for once my fabric on the inside is white so I could use something else other than colored pencil but whatever it's just what I'm used to it's sitting here I've never had any trouble with it it doesn't bother me you know if I were to change to being a couturier I would figure out my preferred chalk but here we are and you could move these darts you know anywhere you wanted this is just how to do the wrap um but I haven't moved my darts today but you could use them as gathering you could use them as pleats tucks whatever you would like again I have a whole video about darts and dart fullness and ways to manipulate the dart fullness around the bodice here on the channel just search darts on my uploads page and it will come up I'm really glad that I made that video I think hopefully it was helpful for quite a few people to learn about how darts can be used to create different designs because that's basically what I do all the dang time here on the channel except for today I'm leaving them right where they were and here are my tulip sleeves I do find the easiest way to finish these is to just line them so I have again lightweight black cotton to line my sateen sleeves here and I'm pinning that right sides together along the hem of my sleeves so that I can go ahead and hem these or like bag line the hem of them I suppose I feel like I'm just using bag lining when I mean something else but you know what I mean right yes and once again I apologize for the state of my right arm this was back when it was not looking its best it's much better now the perils of rescuing cats but both the cats and I are pretty much on the mend now so no big deal the cats are definitely fine I'm nearly fine and uh hopefully that means that I can make another tattoo appointment soon so sorry I got a tax return I wasn't expecting uh on the day that my favorite eye shadow brand released new eyeshadow it was a great situation really a great timing there to receive unexpected tax returns and so maybe I need to make an appointment for more ink now that I have a little bit more flexible fun outside of my savings planned for the year because of course I am supposed to be saving for a house you know working on it but I'll just pin all the darts on my skirt pieces as well since these A-line skirt pieces actually have darts which is unusual but it is all right for a little bit of variety and over here on the machine I can start sewing all that stuff I just prepped including lots of darts um just starting at the large end of the dart sewing off the tip and then tying the spare threads here shut this is just how I learned to do darts and how I always do them um there are many ways to do a dart whichever way works for you I think is the best way for you that's fine you know I'm not uh prescriptive about these kind of things I just like to show how it works for me but if you have another method go for it yeah we're all just trying to make nice things as I always say but I have new little snippy scissors over here that are less cute than my old ones were but these ones are Fisker scissors or Fiskar whatever they are and they're actually sharp which is a nice change so they're not as cute as the cute little embroidery scissors I used to have like these rainbow oil slick scissors over here but I had to upgrade to actual proper thread snips because I was tired of tightening the screw on those scissors three times a day so now I have proper scissors over here by the machine even if they are small and it's been a nice adjustment but lots of darts to sew here for the front linings the fronts the backs of the bodice and then of course for the skirt but which is no trouble lots of little triangles I always say like that's why you got to get really comfortable with the dart if you want to make fitted clothing or like retro clothing um start work with wovens in general actually um because you're gonna have to sew a lot of darts to make that flat fabric work on a 3d body so you need lots of practice and you will get it if you start making woven clothing and then again I can hem my tulip sleeves here just sew hems of that right sides together with its lining with half inch seam allowance as always zip those through the machine here and then over on the ironing board I can start pressing all that stuff so pressing my darts here on the center back skirt towards the center back there's that just pressing out some of my fold lines from ironing the fabric earlier lots of pressing to be done of course but I will press all my darts usually towards the center it's just again how I was taught or how I learned you can press all of your darts to the side I think it's more important that you keep it consistent than you do one or the other honestly and then I have my little collar here I will clip the curves on this stand collar again you'll notice I did not use any interfacing on this or any inner lining or anything to keep my collar stiff that's again just because cotton sateen is uh stable enough on its own it's neither going to fray apart on me and it um has enough stability within the fabric itself to stand up I'm not worried even a single layer like this I have a very thin black cotton in here but it's perfectly fine with just one layer of sateen to hold itself up it will be plenty to keep it smooth around the back of my neck here I'll just press that again you could understitch something like this as well any options you know depending on what fabric you're using kind of makes uh you know different choices for you in some ways the textile demands different choices I guess but for this another cotton sateen garment we all know how I love sewing with cotton sateen it's just the most flexible and nicest fabric it's so soft to wear it's easy to wash I mean what can go wrong you know it's stiff enough to make bottom weights out of but still you can still make like soft-ish dresses out of it I love cotton sateen it's my favorite fabric and this uh floral cotton sateen I think they do still have some of this left at mood so I'll link it below if that's the case um this particular floral I think they have a little bit left over there but I do like a printed sateen from mood one of my favorite places to pick up cotton sateens um especially printed ones because they don't have a ton of solids I wish someone out there was offering a full range of jewel toned cotton sateens either someone come teach me how to dye fabric perfectly and evenly or start making jewel toned cotton sateens in a full range please please but I will go ahead here and attach the facing along the front edge of my top skirt layer for my wrap of the skirt here of course if you just added a waistband onto the skirt it would be a wrap skirt same if you added like a tie onto the end of this top you could have a wrap top I'm just sewing them together to make a dress all patterns are very versatile in this way but I'll just pin along these curves and stitch that over on the machine leave the needle down anytime I need to get around a point or curve like that and just finish all the way down to the hem again it's the uh crispness or like quality of cotton sateen that allowed me to do this curve here on the skirt as well and once again you will not see this in the finished garment because the print is busy enough that this detail gets completely hidden so really should make a solid color one of these it'd be nice to do a solid color and then to do bias binding on all this instead of a facing so that you could do the bias binding in a contrasting color and really highlight these curves um but this time alas here we are with the printed fabric I've just been waiting to use this one for over well over a year now and it was so pretty that I didn't want to use it almost sometimes the fabric is so nice like I'm afraid to cut into it of course so things sit in my stash for over a year while I think do I have the perfect design for this but perfection waiting for perfect for perfection is always a dangerous game so you know I decided hey girl needs a wrap dress let's just grab this dark floral we all know how I love a black background floral it's perfect for my version of summer where things are still a little bit dark and here I am flat lining the top of that facing to the waistline while I serge this and I should have left it free and open you'll see why later but you know I was thinking oh I'll have it out of the way no don't do that but uh serge the rest of your edges of course if they're going to be left this garment is going to be unlined so um just figured I'll run them through the serger since I have one of course you could always do a zigzag stitch cut with pinking shears other ways to finish raw edges on the inside of your garments um also bias hug snug rayon seam binding that you can see at the top of the screen here actually is a very very very lightweight rayon woven tape that you can use to encase your raw edges of fabric I use that on lighter weight or fancy fabrics I am going to go ahead and again like I said kind of bag line the front wrap opening area of the fronts here with the lightweight cotton and I don't need to go all the way up to the top of the neck where my collar will be so I'm starting from where the neckline is collarless basically and again going around these curves I've kind of sketched those in with a piece of white chalk here so I know exactly where to follow along all the darts on these front pieces are finished I'm just putting right sides together and lining that front opening and I need to clip my curves once again you watch me clip curves all the time and that's because it is a non-skippable step there are a few things where I say you know this is a firm rule and clipping curves is one of them clipping curves and corners um every once in a while if a curve is shallow enough you will see me get away with not clipping it because the fabric is a loose enough weave or something but most of the time you got to clip your curves you got to press stuff some things are actually mandatory this actually I probably should have understitched speaking of things that are kind of mandatory but alas because I knew the inside of the cotton sateen is like uh textured enough and this cotton is kind of textured that they would like velcro onto each other pretty well and right up here at the top of this uh upper curve I suppose I can put a snip in to release the rest of the fabric at the top of the neckline that will be encased into the collar once again something you will see later but I need to put my snips in up here it is a bit curved so a couple of snips in there everything will lay nicely there we go so I have this little like tab of seam allowance sticking out up here that I can attach to my collar later now the rest of this I'm just going to smooth out and pin into place so that I can serge the edges of all this now that the front is sort of uh bag lined I'm going to just flat line the rest of this by serging the raw edges together with both layers and just treating them as one from now on you've seen me do a lot of flat lining if you've ever watched my costuming videos but every once in a while it is a technique I use even in my more modern aka mid-century garments but now that everything is serged I can go ahead and start sewing the bodice together um the nice thing about making a wrap garment is I don't have to worry about doing a zipper later love that for me but here I'm just attaching my shoulder seams and then my side seams of course right sides together and I can run those to the machine no problemo I do have my collar and my sleeves just kind of sitting to the side as I do each step again sometimes I do the bodice first sometimes I do the skirt first sometimes make the sleeves last sometimes I make them first depends on what mood I'm in on the day but since I have the side seams of my bodice together let's go ahead and just do the side seams of my skirt as well so again I have two skirt fronts you know the top layer and the under layer for the wrap and those just get sewn to their respective sides of the back here because their back is all cut into fold so I'll just pin those and set that next to me so I can do it all over on the machine at once batch processing as I always call it I do have another sateen that's kind of like this that has an ivory background with a black print on it so kind of like the reverse of this fabric and I might make another dress like this out of that one just because I have the same amount of fabric should be able to get with it I think I only actually had two and a half yards of this so I might have because it's a wide width fabric this is like a 54 inch wide fabric I was able to get away with only having two and a half yards normally I would want to have at least three but having the skirt be not a full a-line and having the fabric be wide means that I can get worth having less of it um that's another thing that's a question I still get quite often is how much fabric do I need to make this depends on what size you are depends on the size of the fabric so that's the problem there um if you have like a 45 width fabric it's going to be thinner you'll need more of it uh it's or if you're like a size zero you know person then you won't need as much fabric as I do so it's all very dependent on too many factors for me to be able to recommend you know anything other than what I needed because I know the kind of fabrics that I shop for I usually buy wide width fabrics and I know how much I need for my patterns after doing this for you know 15 years or whatever however long I've been sewing for myself now I'll go ahead and use my tailor's ham to press the curved part of the skirt seams and then press the rest open and flat got a little bit of steam going here this is 100 cotton uh all these both these fabrics were uh pre-washed and pre-dried so I can later throw this dress in the wash if I want to which is the nice thing about summer dresses of course being well anytime anytime not having to dry clean things is convenient as we all know but especially in the summertime when things are only ever hotter in fact it is 91 and sunny according to my computer outside today here in the south Denver area I'm going to find the center back of my back neckline here and same with the collar so I can match those up I'm just going to pin the sateen layer of the collar to the garment and then I will use the like free flowing little lining here to encase the seam allowance and the neckline later just like I did in last week's video honestly or anytime I do a stand collar really I think there was one video where I forgot how to do this which just goes to show sometimes depending on the time of the month I am more or less insomniac and it comes to play comes out to uh in fact I fell asleep at 4 a.m last night so dang it but you know what are you gonna do if you're me you've tried everything and hoping for the best and putting out a podcast is about as good as it gets for me once it's past the 3 a.m mark just sew that on over here on the machine half inch seam allowance I'm just using my other hand you can see to guide this through the machine so that nothing is getting puckered uh I like to keep my hand in between layers sometimes hopefully you don't sew over your hand in those instances but be careful and all but it does help to avoid puckers or things getting folded where they're not supposed to be but this is a curved seam this neckline so I'm going to go ahead and clip that press all the seam allowance up into the collar and then fold this lining in over that seam allowance to make sure everything is nice and finished cleanly on the inside and then I will hand slip stitch this all down just to finish that off and make sure it's nice and clean and of course the front is flat lined ish and then the back here doesn't need a facing because all the seam allowance gets pushed up into this collar so it's actually quite clean to do these stand colors or colors in general this is probably going to be oh maybe my you know second to last summary project here on the channel I'm already in fall mode um you know I've been browsing the hall I've been doing a little Halloween hunting out there at Michael's and Joanne's and stuff I maybe picked up a little trinket bowl and a bug on a stick thing at Michael's uh and I'm gonna start looking for pumpkins as soon as they come out yeah they have these absolutely massive giant pumpkins at Joanne's but they're hundreds of dollars I really want these giant fake pumpkins but they're so expensive even on sale they're expensive so but I've been saying for years that I want giant fake pumpkins and they finally have them but I just have to wait until they go to 70% off oh our air conditioning has come on one moment please I'm just putting the gathering stitching in the top of my sleeve caps on the puff side of these tulip sleeves and I can go ahead and pull that gathering down I did use the pattern to mark the centers of the tops of the sleeves and the underarm like center where the side seam goes so I can line these up but I'll just pull my gathering threads here I have two lines of gathering stitching so I can properly puff and overlap these I'll go ahead and set them into the garment you can see the other side the sleeve is already set in and again tulip sleeves I would say of all the different sleeves easiest to set because again they are overlapped and if things are a quarter inch off everything will be fine and no one will know so that's the kind of nice thing about these I'll just pin this in here of course the sleeves are never the most fun part of any garment but we are nearing the end here and we don't have a zipper today so this is the last hurdle really to get over for this particular project but yes I'm fully entering Halloween prep mode of course as a creator which seems a strange thing to call myself uh better than influencer though so what are you gonna do but uh as someone who does Halloween themed content I have to make that content before Halloween in order to have it up in time for Halloween so I've been planning my Halloween projects and gathering materials for a couple of things I want to do and I uh am going to make a really fun cocktail dress with some orange fabric that I bought for a different reason and some spiderweb sequined spiderweb lace that I may have ordered all the way from China so you'll see that in October a little while to go now but I'm I've got fall on the brain you know it's happening just have those sleeves all set in here and again just like I was saying last week I like to try and press my seam allowance in these out like into the arm or into the sleeve so I'm just gonna fill this sleeve with steam basically and then press my um pressing ham in here to uh try or tailor's ham to try and uh coax the seam allowance to be out into the sleeve and help the puff stay puffed I might as well use that to my advantage since this is an unlined garment again again if it is lined garment I usually have the seam allowance go inwards but for this I just push it into the sleeve call it good and now I can go ahead and attach the bodice and the skirt together so I'm going to line up everything line up the side seams of the bodice with the side seams of the skirt like this line up where the darts match up with darts or the centers match up with centers etc all the way along here so I can sew my waist seam between the skirt and the bodice switch back over to the machine so I can do that and again I wish I had left that little facing top of that thing free you'll see why in just a moment as I start finishing up this garment it's actually quite a quick one to put together this is a relatively simple um both to draft and to make honestly it doesn't you know require too many pieces and doesn't require anything more than some darts which again it's a quick 15 minutes at the machine um so this was probably a single day project for me or would be in general especially if I wasn't filming but here I'm thinking wow if you had left this open you could encase this seam allowance in the lining yeah I didn't think of that until it was too late huh you'll see how I fix for that in a minute but this is where our bias tape is going to come into play here I'm going to go ahead and finish this other side this is the underside of the wrap front and I'll finish that with bias tape you'll see what that looks like so I have my bias here that I cut earlier I'm just going to trim that pin them together stitch this together iron it into place make this into bias tape basically because right now it's just bias ribbon but I need it to be double fold bias tape of a lighter weight than they sell in stores I wish they had lightweight like cotton lawn or cotton wall bias tape for sale would save me a lot of time like pre-washed lightweight cotton because the bias tape that they have at the store is uh like a broad cloth it's almost a quilting weight or more the bias tape that they have like joann's so irritating I would love a nice lightweight floopier one like this but it's not too much trouble to make I'm just you know as I always say kind of lazy so to have it pre-made would be awesome but I'm just pressing that just pinching and pressing it you can get those little bias tape maker things I find just pinching it easier honestly oh people are walking around upstairs we have our creaky floor sorry about that but I'm just going to use this to finish from the waist down on the underside of my uh skirt this is the like full front side of this uh a-line skirt here like so and then I'm going to come around the and just go all the way along the hem here just do this all in the same piece of bias tape I'm going to stitch this on and then I'll fold it all to the inside pin it into place and then hand stitch this down along the inside like along the hem um and down the skirt of the under layer and I'm just going to fold this over where it meets the facing on the other side for the other side of the skirt wrap a bit hopefully you know what I mean once again I would have liked to kind of fully line this but I did not have enough material for that but up at the top where this meets the waist where I started I'm just going to fold that over like so and have this be finished like that again another bit that no one will ever see it's the underside of the wrap and uh inside the dress so you know just hand stitch all this down and I'll hand him all this and again all the way to the facing of the other side and then up here at the waist where I should have left by facing free to be able to encase this raw nonsense I'm just going to take an extra piece of the bias and like make a little slip cover for this area basically and just cover all this up with a little piece of this of course piecing is period as the historical costumer always knows so we'll say that it's um accurate for whatever time period this dress is supposed to be as well this dress uh it's kind of just like vaguely mid-century honest at this point because I put a tulip kind of almost like a late 30s sleeve into a 1940s style wrap dress if we based off that pattern from earlier so yeah it's kind of just a floater slightly retro dress and of course a rather modern print here from mood but I just need to sew on some skirt hooks at the waist I'm just doing this like where the lap ends you know like where you would have ties normally I'm just putting hooks in here sewing my eyes to the dress uh like the under layer and my hooks to the outer layer and then I'll be able to slip this buddy on and wear it out and about you know ready to go I haven't been able to wear this one out yet it's been quite hot honestly to the point of not only do I not want to even wear a cotton dress I don't want to leave the house so I've been staying inside with the air conditioning as we know I am want to do but I'm sure I'll be wearing this one out soon and here is my finished wrap dress in this lovely floral satin it's a nice dark floral you know how I love a black background floral something I can really work into late fall into fall and winter even as well as into the summertime with maybe white accessories to brighten it up for the sunny season and then just keep things dark the rest of the time like I like it I hope you enjoyed seeing how this pattern came together today and that this tutorial will be helpful for some of you who have been asking about the wrap fronted dress it really is just as simple as the wrap back just have the bust to contend with so you might have to make a mock-up just to decide how much extra ease you need to take out of that front wrap but you can always just take extra wedges of fullness and put those into the bust just like a dart to really help with any gaping on a wrap garment like this and thank you as always for watching today I'll be back here with more vintage fashion sewing costuming and crafting real soon so I'll see you then bye