Perfect shirt dress - with birds on it!

I bought this beautifully floaty organic voile fabric and decided to make it into McCall's pattern 6696.  It is a really great pattern, comes with different pieces for the bust depending on your size, which meant I could make this dress straight out of the pattern envelope with no changes or alterations at all.

The waistband, collar and front button bands are all hand-stitched down on the inside, which is an enjoyable task for me but you could easily do top stitching on your machine if you didn't have the time or inclination for the hand sewing.
I got to wear this dress for the first time on a recent holiday to Amsterdam, so these photos are all real life shots from my holiday.

I met up with my cousin Donna in Amsterdam and we had about 10 days of girl time in Europe, it was great fun.  Here we are visiting a statue of Anne Frank, the house where she and her family hid during the war is just around the corner from here.

The dress pattern is designed to be worn with a belt, as there is no button placement at the waist so that a belt buckle can sit nicely.  I wish now that I had just moved the button placements so that one sat at the waist as I don't intend to wear a belt with mine, and now after sitting it gapes a bit at the waist.  Oh well, a hidden press stud shall do the trick I think.

In this picture we are having a taste of raw herring!  It was okay, Donna didn't like it.  Here you can see the back of the dress has some gathering in the bodice, it gathers above the waist band and below the shoulder yoke.  It makes it a bit blousey and quite comfortable actually, I kept all of the gathering in the pattern and am pleased I did.

A very soft and light weight fabric for summer holidays and a great pattern for both crisp and floaty fabrics!
This is also my first goal completed for the lovely Katy's Finish-Along: link in my sidebar-->

Unfortunately I didn't get to wear it again when we went to Paris, as it crinkled really easily and there were no irons in any of the rooms that we stayed in.  But it certainly was a me-made holiday!  I wore my two Moneta Maxi dresses (only one photo!?) as well as a Butterick top:

Butterick 5692

   

Moneta 

And there is one other new dress that I made for this holiday, which I'll share in my next post!