When I cleaned up my fabric stash, now already a year ago, I rediscovered a nice white linen-cotton blend fabric. A perfect fabric for a nice summer dress. And now, a year later I decided to make that linen summer dress.
Like I normally do, I try to envision the dress before starting on the pattern. For this dress I wanted a easy-breezy cut, so I came up with the idea of doing a wrap-skirt. For the bodice I choose a deep V-neck in the front, because I like how it shows on me. Plus, I’ve the cleavage so why not. For the back, since it would be a breezy summer dress, I also did a deep V.
Pretty quickly I knew I wanted to give another special touch to the dress. Because white is just white I wanted to add a pop of colour. So I came up with the idea of adding a coloured stitching, almost embroidery, to the waistline. I didn’t knew exactly how I wanted it to look like, but could think about this while drawing the pattern.
I didn’t make a toile of this dress first. Because I have made a number of dresses for myself over the years I have a base pattern to start from which I, over the years, have altered to fit me perfectly. Changes I made to this pattern, compared to a traditional base pattern for a sleeveless dress, are taking out a little extra in the dart under the bust and taking out at the waistline in center back. By taking out from the dart under the bust you create a more figure hugging effect without flattening the breast. It just gives a more rounded effect to the breast. I also take out from the waistline in the back because I have a slightly hollow back posture. If I don’t do this I get a lot of excess fabric in the back.
I decide on 1 dart in the front, so I redirected all the darts down, towards the waistline. This gives 1 big dart to stitch, but also a smoother surface in the arm region. For the skirt I drew a wrap skirt, going from slightly above the knee in de front to mid-calf length in the back.
Like I said, I didn’t want a plain white dress, so I added some embroidery-like stitching to the waistline. I used 7 different colours of pink thread, going from really light pink to almost burgundy, to create some kind of ombre effect. Next to changing the colour from light to dark I also made the stitching bigger. Going from a small zigzag 2 cm in height to a really big almost 10 cm above and below the waistline.
Number of seams I had to redo: 0
But I started with doing the embroidery only on the outer layer and changed to stitching through both outer layer and lining, because to stitches were causing to much stress one ply of fabric.
If I recreate this I will: think about improvements I can still make to the base pattern. For instance to the shoulders. The pattern doesn’t follow the slope of my shoulders perfectly, which sometimes causes the straps to easily fall down.
