I love sleeveless dresses, but I don’t love sewing separate armhole and neckline facings. They are annoying and even with understitching and tacking them at seam lines, they love to try to flip out, and often require more pressing after laundering than you might want to bother with. And then they still want to flop to the outside when you get dressed. Annoying.
For awhile, that was the main reason I preferred lining the bodices of my dresses versus using facings. No facings? Nothing to worry about flipping out. Problem solved!
Kinda.
You don’t always want to line a bodice. Or at least, I don’t. It’s basically sewing the bodice twice, and there’s a lot more hand sewing to close everything up along the waist and center back seamline. Plus, it uses more fabric. There’s lots of reasons you might not want to line a bodice.
So once I came across the technique to do an all-in-one facing for sleeveless dresses, I was sold! It prevents your facings from over flopping to the outside of your dress. Even vintage sewing patterns sometimes feature all-in-one facings! But when they do, there’s usually some little hand sewing and/or fabric contortionism at the shoulders to make it work. But not this less-fussy, modern method!
I put together a YouTube tutorial for how to easily draft and sew an all-in-one facing, for a dress bodice with a center back zipper. (This is key—this method won’t work if you have a side zipper, though there’s another method that will; I’ll do a tutorial on that in the future).
Watch the video on YouTube, and learn how easy it is to create and sew an all-in-one facing:
Say goodbye to flipping facings forever! ??
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