Butterick 5206 - the first version

Fabric stashes are funny. Sometimes, I remember the provenance of every piece of fabric - other times, not so much. I found the fabric for this dress in my stash - and I had absolutely no idea where or when I bought it. (If that's not a hint that I need to stop buying fabric - I don't know what is.*)

Anyway - this was the first version of Butterick 5206. I love this dress - I've already worn it ~5 times - and would wear it more, but I'm a wimp about wearing dresses and skirts in winter. 

There are two things of note in the construction. The first is the neck and back binding - I ignored the directions that would have you cut a knit fabric on bias. Instead, I cut a strip of fabric on lengthwise grain, folded it in half along the long edge, stitched that to the *wrong* side of the neck, and then flipped it over, and top stitched from the right side. (I forgot to take pictures - hope that made sense.) This gave me a very lovely professional-looking finish. The bias would have been a disaster. (Seriously, Butterick?)

The second was the sash. The directions have you attach it to the waist, and then wrap it around. I thought the dress would be more versatile if the sash wasn't attached. However, the wrong side of the sash kept showing, and since this knit fabric has a very prominent wrong side, I cut two pieces out for the sash, and sewed them together to eliminate the problem of the wrong side showing.

I've a bit of a hankering to sew one more version of this dress - however, I have plenty of *necessary* sewing, and I think I might get to that instead.