1946 dress--Finishing up.

Okay, we've got everything but the placket and hem.  Normally, I'd tell you to ignore the placket fold line, because nine times out of ten, there's something going on that makes it so that there's no room for the buttons where they should go--between the collar pieces.    For this dress, though, there wasn't a problem!  I folded on the fold line and ironed it down, before using a hem stitch (by hand) to tack it in place.   This has the advantage of being completely invisible from the outside of the dress.  This is the same way I tacked down the bias tape binding around the collar.  After that, I moved on to the hem.

This was the most challenging hem I've ever done by far.  It had a five inch deep hem so there's plenty of room to grow, and it's darn near being a full circle skirt.  I decided, after asking around, that the best thing to do was machine gather the panels individually and then hem it in place, but it didn't work very well.

It looked really bad from the outside, so after ripping hair out, I decided that the thing to do was to fold it three or four times and hand gather the panels.

  While the result is puckered from the inside, it's smooth from the outside.
  I did iron it afterwards, and the hemline just disappeared.

  This is in process of actually hemming it, not just having it pinned in place.    After I finished the hem, it was time to do the buttonholes and buttons.  I compared the buttons to the button guide, and it was exactly the right size for my buttons.  So I used transfer paper, like this--

  

And my most useful tool--a wooden chopstick to transfer the button markings.  Because my version of this pattern is longer, I moved the template and added more buttonhole marks to my fabric.  After that, it was just a matter of sewing the buttonholes by machine, cutting them open, sewing on the buttons, and giving it a final press.  And here is the finished product!