And so onto my third Moneta. I made one myself here and then one for my sister as a present, so have probably covered the relevant construction details before. I didn’t make any significant changes with regards to how I constructed this dress, so will just note the changes and, of course, the collar below.

I made this dress for the #monetaparty on Instagram back in February, but fell prey to a nasty bug right before the deadline and so didn’t finish. That kind of annoyed me, so the dress sat languishing unhemmed in my cupboard for a good while, until a #sewphotohop prompt encouraged me to rescue it from the mothballs and finish the darn thing off.

I decided to change up the styling a bit for this since it was, well, … made for a party, after all, and thought I’d see if I could give it a little vintage touch with some contrasting fabrics and a few adjustments. I had this lovely fronded black and white poly blend knit sitting around in my stash and thought it went rather well with the fuchsia rayon knit. I played around with the collar pieces a bit to get a nice combo from the print and am reasonably happy with how it turned out, with some reservations.

For this iteration, I lengthened the waist by around an inch since I felt the bodice to be a little short last time. I’ve seen this mentioned by other sewists too. However, that was a mistake. The rayon is quite stretchy, firstly, and even accounting for that, the waist is now a little long. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not so much long-waisted as I am long-hipped and that the bust-to-waist measurement isn’t overly out. I toyed with taking the waist in again after I finished it, but the skirt is already a little shorter than I intended, so I’m leaving as is and calling it a design feature. Ha. The other issue I have is that the rayon is sooo clingy. I’m not opposed to form-fitting, but this fabric clings to every lump and bump as you can see from the back. Definitely a dress where I need a bit of shapewear.

My other main addition was of course the Peter Pan collar. I got the template from the Colette Extras section, which gives you six different collars to download for free. I could swear I took photos of the process since it was an addition, but… I can’t find them. What I can tell you is that I had to attach the collar a couple of times before I got it to stretch all the way round the neckline – it seems very slightly too short. I certainly couldn’t get anything like a 1/4″ overlap. I also made a mess of stitching in the ditch on one of the shoulders to secure the collar to the dress. I’ll redo it sometime… maybe. I also topstitched the collar down to the neckline after attaching. I found that this was imperative for it to lay remotely flat.

And, uh, that’s about it for this Moneta! I really just made it as a kind of experiment. I’m not sure it totally worked out (the proportions didn’t really anyway and it makes me feel a little bit like a fuchsia sausage) and I don’t realistically know how much wear it will get. I’m sure it will come in handy for anything remotely tea dance-like, and I do like a good tea dance. Or even just tea.