Boat necked lady skater-tutorial

Hi everyone, happy Sunday! I hope you're all having a good day.  I am suffering a little following a night out with a friend last night and am so not in the mood to do the work on my doctoral proposal that today was set aside for.  Instead I'm bringing you another lady skater!

Making my Bronte top reminded me that it had been a while since I had used my much loved lady skater pattern and on my recent trip to Birmingham, I picked up a lovely stripey jersey that was screaming out to be made up right now!  However my stripey jersey was whispering to me that it should be made into a boat neck-enter another hack!

 This was a really easy hack to achieve.  I traced off the front and back pieces.  On the front piece I measure and marked 15cm up from the middle of the neckline.  I then measured and marked 4cm across the shoulder.  I then used my french curve to join these two points (however, I've done this kind of thing just eyeballing the line between the two points so you don't need to worry if you don't have a french curve).

The only thing I did to the back piece was to measure 4cm across the shoulder piece and create a line from there to the centre back to create a new neckline.  

I then made up the dress as I normally would.  

The skirt is a little longer than I would like but it isn't actually hemmed yet.  I wanted to take advantage of the sun and a day out to photograph it and as jersey doesn't fray, I just went with it.

 The stripe matching worked pretty well but I discovered the stripes are not on grain which has made  for a strange optical illusion around the waist seam (hence the belt).

 The boat neck has turned out really well but on me it has a slight cowl effect as I appear to have a hollow chest (learning more about fitting has some knock on effects on the way you view your body!)  Next time if I want a boat neck that lies flatter against the collar bone I will angle the central neckline extension (the one in red) a bit more towards the shoulder seam. 

 Although spring is pretending that it has arrived in the UK, the wind when I was taking these pictures was fierce and I was so cold.  I was very happy to put my other layers back on to take some more silly photos with my sister. 

 Thanks for the photo skills Leonie!

We were out taking advantage of the sunshine by having a walk along the south bank and got a few good photos of London monuments:

 Tower of London

Tower Bridge

Overall I'm really pleased with my new stripey dress.  Anyone else in the market for a boat necked dress?  I think I have just enough scraps left over from this to make a stripey vest top which should be super useful for summer.