Vionnet dress - almost there

I had this dress cut out and sitting in a bag on my desk for quite a while because when I sewed the waist dart on the front I realised that this is one of those fabrics which my sewing machine haaaaaaaaaaates. It has a rubbery feel to the stretch and is what I call pin resistant - it's hard to push a pin through. The overlocker loves it, and it is heavy and drapey - perfect for a dress of this style, so I was going to persevere. Unfortunately the busy print pretty much renders the interesting seaming invisible. Fortunately it hides the hole I cut right at the CF when I trimmed away the excess facing strips from the neckline. (Yes I swore as I sewed it up.)

Oh, and it clings to every little bump. The bumps you can see on the hip are the adjusting knobs on the dummy. I don't have adjusting knobs, but I do have my own collection of bumps.

Inside out you can see much better how it's put together.

I love how it falls in such perfect graceful folds. I really don't love how hard it was to finish the neck and armholes. My first plan was to use a self facing. My attempts to sew this using my machine looked terrible, even with a brand new stretch needle and a walking foot, even using my usually fool proof press'n'seal stabilizer method. I tried using a narrow three thread overlock, but that lettuced out (first time in 20 years I wished my machine had a differential feed). Hand rolling (on a sample) also looked awful. Lying in bed stewing over it and describing my problems (at length and in detail) to my long suffering husband made me feel better but didn't produce an answer. Stewing about it some more after he went to sleep (sensible man) made me wonder if bias strips of a woven fabric would work as facings. Vionnet used on grain strips of self fabric to do this, but with my very stretchy fabric I thought bias would be better. And what do you know - perfect solution. The woven fabric stopped all the skipped stitches and finishes the edges perfectly. I still need to press the edges, but trust me, they sit very nicely against me.

So this is going to be a wearable dress. I'm going to leave it on the dummy for a couple of days to let the bias hang (yeah, I cut this very stretchy knit with a fantastic degree of recovery on the bias. Just for the hell of it), but I don't expect a whole lot of change. I'm thinking of hemming it longer to make the most of the swishy skirt. My first plan was just below the knee, but I think maybe longer would be better. Next problem - how the h*** am I going to sew the hem?