Joanna's Easter Dress

I just finished sewing Joanna's Easter dress, just in time to give it to her after church tonight.

Here’s something I discovered about this taffeta:  because it has a heat-sensitive metallic thread running through it, ironing it with too hot an iron or using steam shrinks the metallic thread and makes the stuff look like seersucker.  (I tried it on a little corner of the leftover pieces.)  I had my iron turned way down to the wool setting – it’s a steam pressure iron with a separate reservoir – and I didn’t steam the taffeta.  The nice thing about this iron is that you can adjust the temperature of the water in the reservoir separately from the temperature of the iron, so no matter how cool the iron is, you can still steam.  This way, I didn’t have to switch temperatures back and forth to iron first taffeta, then steam cotton lining.  Even with very low heat, the metallic thread drew up a bit. 

“Can we all just pretend that it came that way,” I asked Hannah, “and we like it, and it’s better than ever, and everything’s hunky dory?”

She thought we could.

Hannah has a couple of re-embroidered and sequined pink appliqués to put on the front of the dress.