What to do with stripes

Stripe fabric, it can be a bit of a pain, they do say not to wear the stripes horizontally as it is unflattering.  There is also the issue of matching them up as depending on what you are making matching around a curve can be troublesome.  I had bought this stripe jersey fabric a while ago and to be honest I was disappointed when it arrived as the colour was not what I expected.  I thought it was a black and white stripe but when it arrived it was more of a very pale peach colour. This colour does nothing for me so it sat on my sewing table in the bag for about two  months making me feel like I had wasted my money!
Then there was the issue of what to do, I had thought a dress  ( I know another one!) but I wasn't sure how I would lay the stripes on it.

So today I decided to just get on with it because waiting for inspiration was getting me nowhere,  I decided to do the back and front pieces of the dress with a centre seam so that I could have the stripes meeting at the middle in a point. This meant I laid the stripe on a diagonal as I cut out each front/back half.  There is probably a technical name for this but I don't know it, being a self taught get on with it sort of dress maker.
The bottom of the dress I laid the fabric vertical, this way I feel the dress looks more interesting than if all of the dress fabric was used in the same way.

I have to say it was a nuisance to work with, I bought some ball pointed needles but they did not help on this very stretchy jersey, the first one broke after ten minutes. I had to just ease all the seams and go slowly, I overlocked afterwards otherwise all the seams would have just snapped.

I am now really happy with how this turned out despite much unpicking when seams moved and did not line up and the overly bouncy fabric!

When I came to face around the sleeves I did  not have enough fabric left, this was mainly due to the fact that in laying out my pieces in a different way to get the desired effect on the dress, I did not have long pieces left to making binding. Argh!

So a quick look in my fabric box and I had a bit of the lace from the evening dress I took up for a friend ages ago.  I also used some of that on my Christmas  party dress hem and still I have some left.  You see  these little bits do come in handy, so I faced around the sleeves using that.

You can see in this picture that the fabric is peachy not white but in the main picture it looks white.

Anyway this solved my problem of facing the sleeves, I did think of adding some around the neck too but my husband said that may be too much so it stays as it is.  Another bit of bother with the hem that got partially sewn then unpicked three times! Then hand stitched as it would just not lay correctly under the machine without twisting and missing stitches.  Sometimes doing it by hand is just better and it's invisible.

A little note about my overlocker, it has been a bit funny to work with the whole time I've had it, I recently got it working and changed blades/ sorted tension etc. Still it did not like the right hand needle, I took it out, removed the cotton for that needle and now it works great on just three threads.  It uses less cotton this way anyhow but still gives a good effect.  If you are having this same trouble just try it.