Lately I’ve had an interest in shirt dresses. Of course it’s a trend at the moment, but I just like the casual dressed up feeling of it. But since I sometimes lack bottoms, I thought why not make just the skirt part of a shirt dress?
For the fabric I choose a popelin cotton fabric with a print on it. The print I actually designed myself, and got it printed via spoonflower. It’s a light brown background with a dotted print in different colors. Because of the dots in the print I thought it would be nice to use squared buttons to go with it. Luckily I also have a stash of buttons and I found five nice white once to go with the print.
So for the pattern I decided to just draw the pattern directly onto the fabric. Because that’s a nice thing about popelin fabric, you can just draw on it directly using a chalk pen. This way I got to save some time first drawing a base on paper, then taking out the cutting patterns, pinning them onto the fabric and cutting them out. And since I knew I wanted a simple skirt, directly drawing on the fabric would be ideal.
The pattern is basically a rectangle with rounded edges at the bottom of the skirt. To get it fitted at the waist, I drew another rectangle for the waistband the put a big elastic in. By drawing onto the fabric it was easy to use the full width of the fabric, since the printed width is only about 105 cm. With seam allowance included I need all of this to wrap around my hips. After drawing the two rectangles for the front and back of the skirt and cutting them out, I cut 8 cm from the top of the front panel. This is to create a slightly longer back panel, just like in a men’s shirt.
Next up, sewing!
Sewing this 3 piece skirt was also done in record time. Just stitch the side seams, finish the hem and fold and stitch the waistband with the elastic in between. But before attaching the waistband to the skirt, I stitched in a pleat in the front panel, to give the illusion of an actual button down shirt. Because it’s all in the details babe, but sometimes you just don’t want to make buttonholes. Besides, they would have zero function due to the waistband.
Number of seams I had to redo: 1
If I recreate this I will:
pick a wider fabric, so the skirt is more loose around the hips. Note to myself for next time: Take more pictures!
