Needles & Fashion Meetup!! & McCall's 6744

This weekend I met up with some ladies from the Facebook Group "Needles and Fashion"!
We met for brunch at Beacon Bar & Grill in the District of Columbia.

designed by Christina Carter

And now that I'm writing this post, I realize how "new" of a blogger I am because I have no pics of the restaurant, or the setup of the table with the gifts lol
I didn't even start taking pictures until we were done eating SMH

Experience is the best teacher right? lol anyway.

The food was GREAT: Brunch buffet with unlimited mimosas and Tequila sunrises.

But the company was even BETTER!
It ended up being nine of us ladies.

We had a "1yd or less" gift swap challenge where we all had to make something out of our scraps and then we would swap at brunch.

Aldrena and her new headband and Tamika with her new sunglasses case!

Toni and her new headband and Quita with her new leather clutch!

Lala with her new oversized shrug and Jenese with her new earrings!

Lauren with her new natural hair product package!

Donna and her new silk scarf!

Me and my new tote bag and camo/suede fold-over clutch! Donna made me an extra gift for planning the meet up :-D

Everyone left with one of those little frames to take home in addition to their swap gift!

Okay! About what I wore!

This is McCalls 6744! View B bodice and skirt from View C

I got the fabric for the front of the dress from G Street Fabrics from their $2.97 table.
I got the black fabric I used for the skirt back from Hancock's
and I got the red activewear I used for the racerback from Fashion Fabrics Club

Oh wait... did you miss that? I said the skirt from View C

I put ALOT of effort into the pattern matching on this dress and I'm so pleased!
I cut each piece of the (front of the) skirt on a single layer

I didn't have enough of the fabric I used for the front to cut the bodice on grain so I cut it on the crosswise grain.

As you can see, I didn't even have enough fabric to cut it out all of the way so I just made the same "alteration" to the racer back length as well.

I think the contrast is cute though! with the vertical and horizontal lines.
And I like the color blocked back as well :-D

What's crazy is that the dress is the PERFECT length and I didn't even have enough fabric.
And I'm tall! I'm 5'9 so that's saying something!

I also want to note that I hemmed the bodice flat.
I serged the arms and the neck lines first and then did a narrow hem by just folding the serged edged down twice and stitching.
I decided to try the flat hemming method after Andrea's discussion here and I must say that I LOVE IT.
Definitely going to be using that way much more.
I did not hem the skirt.

 I LOVE this dress!
The only thing is, when the wind picks it up, I better pray that the whole town doesn't see my goodies!
I really could not walk without making sure I hold the slit down.
When I went out that evening,  I wore black jeans underneath the dress and the wind ended up blowing the dress so open that you could see peeks of my waist! lol
I think I'm going to have to tack it down at some point lol

This isn't even the half of the issue lol

What do YOU think about the dress?!
Link your versions in the comment section!


Oh! and the winner of my Blog Anniversary giveaway is:



a Rafflecopter giveaway

Congrats Morgan!!

Morgan blogs over at cosMORGpolitan!

Go check her out :-)


Thanks for reading!
And I read all of the blog suggestions from the blog giveaway and I am definitely going to take them into consideration!
Thank you so much for your input!

See you in the next post!

xoxo, Tasha