More on the Illusion Neckline

I'm back, readers! And I have a great post for you today: some insights into the sewing of a Peggy Hunt-style illusion neckline. As you may recall, I asked for your advice about how to sew this sort of neckline in this post, back in October. You all had so many great ideas! I also got an e-mail from the incredibly generous Sarai of Colette Patterns, who has a Peggy Hunt and offered to send me pictures! Jeez, how sweet is that?

This is Sarai's beautiful dress you see here, a perfect example of Peggy Hunt's work.

Sarai confirmed that the neckline is a very narrow hem, as many of you guessed.

Some super-duper close-ups. It looks machine stitched to me. You?

The wrong side:

 The right side:

I played around with lots of different methods to acheive this type of neckline, and I landed on the cheater's method: the rolled hem on my serger. Here's a snippet of my results:

I love how neat it looks.

My second-favorite method I tried was a machine-stitched baby hem, which I think is what the vintage dress above has. To make a baby hem, (sew one line of machine stitching around the neckline, and turned the seam in on the stitching. Then stitch to the left of your first line of stitching. Trim down your seam allowance very closely and very carefully with tiny scissors. Turn the hem in one last time and stitch.) This is a bit time consuming because you have to be certain to keep everything exactly uniform, as it can start looking sloppy with anything less than perfect, even stitching. It does make a lovely neckline, though.

So there you have it. A big thanks to Sarai for the pictures!