I really liked the first Bianca dress I made, and I wanted to make another one, slightly different but based on the same slash & spread idea. The first dress had gathers diagonally from the shoulder to the opposite side of the torso, but I felt those torso gathers were a bit underwhelming, so I decided to leave them out completely, and do pleats (not gathers) to the shoulder instead.
The pattern was my basic self-drafted Repro knit dress pattern. I knew from the previous dress that I needed to make the neck opening narrower, so I did that. Then I marked out my slash lines, from shoulder to waist. I also learned from my earlier dress that the pleats needed to start nice and close to the collar curve.
The Slashening
Then I put the paper underneath and did the spreading. This was fiddly work, because the strips of paper were going very curly!
The Spreadening
To get the fabric shaping right for the pleats, I folded the pattern into the pleats, making sure they folded in the direction I wanted them to (towards the armhole, not towards the neck).
The Pleatening
Which left a very pleasing zigzag shape, which would end up being another fiddly job to cut out.
The Zigzagening
And that was the pattern done. All my other pattern pieces (Back and sleeves) would be the same as normal.
The Wonkening
My fabric was a polyester knit, that I got off Ebay (from Coastal Cloth Collectivehttps://www.ebay.co.uk/str/coastalclothcollective – I couldn’t see this print there, but they do lots of stunning jersey prints). It had quite a wide band of unprinted white edge, but even so, there was a safe 150cm of printed width, enough to cut the body pieces side by side, and still leave me enough fabric remaining under the sleeves cut to make a skirt, if I wanted to. It’s a nice firm jersey, so it’s got enough substance for a skirt.
I know it’s a floral, but I can’t help thinking of fried eggs!
I did the main bit of sewing at a lovely Sewcial Sewing at Redhill, run by Tania (@justletmesew on instagram). It was a really nice sociable way to spend an afternoon sewing. There was plenty of floor-space to cut this dress out. The construction started with creating the pleats – marking them, pinning them and tacking them, so that I could easily use that shoulder as is.
Pleats pinned and tacked
Which all turned out pretty well. I sewed the shoulder/collar seams, using the same self-facing turn-down method for the neck as I did in the first Bianca dress – you make the neck section twice as long as you really want it, sew the side seams up, then while the dress is still inside out, fold the top of the neck down, and stitch along the collar side seams, and as you turn the dress right way out, the neckhole unfolds and you have a magically self-facing collar. Obviously this works here because the jersey is knit and won’t fray, but I suppose you could do it with woven fabrics, if you did the edge finishing before the collar side seam.
The self facing collar
And with the collar the right way out
And from then on, it was a very standard construction. Having sewn the shoulder seams, I inserted the sleeves flat, and sewed down the side seams. That took me to the end of my Sewcial Sewing afternoon. I finished it all off, hemming the cuffs and hem with a twin needle, a couple of nights later, and was all ready to wear this out to our planned work team Christmas do, but it got postponed. So I wore it to our family Christmas get-together. It feels quite dressy!
I don’t blame you for not remembering Part 1 of the Rosy Ruby Dress. This project has been on the Naughty Step for over 2 1/2 years. I’ll be honest, it very nearly went onto the Repurposing The Fabric As Something Else Completely Step. But I got a last minute chance to do another Sewcation, in September, with CL, the Thrifty Stitcher, and Amanda of The Sewcial Studio, and about half an hour before I left home, I changed from my original plan (working on the Alex shirt) and pulled out this project instead. I figured these two ladies could probably help me work out what the problems were with this garment, and how fixable they might be. It does mean I’ve not photo-documented my process as fully as I might otherwise have done.
Technically the boring beige is the right side, but I fell in love with the slightly pearly ruby rose wrong side. Also, check out the two-tone fluffy selvedge – more on that later.
The original online workshop was on a hot and bothered kind of day, and not a good experience (not the teacher’s fault at all, just heat and extra pattern grading eating into the sewing time, and stress, and things not going to plan). This is how the dress looked, back in 2021.
I really wasn’t happy with it
I wasn’t happy with it – it looked bleaugh, and it was infused with stress and hate. So it had been on my Work in Progress pile for all this time and it was reaching the point where I would either have to do something to make it work, or throw it in the bin (metaphorically – I wouldn’t have actually binned it, I’d have reused the fabric in some way).
Time is a great healer. It gives you distance from the negative feelings and allows you to look at an old project with new eyes. Just looking at the dress again, and pressing it (on account of 2½ year’s worth of being scrunched up and wrinkled), helped me feel better about it. I fell in love with the gorgeous pearly rosy pink all over again. So that was a really good start.
Trying it on, it was clear that my main problem with it, was that it was a Shapeless Sack. The second problem was Ridiculously Large Sleeves, which were also shapeless. The third problem was kind of related to the second, in that the raglan sleeves had resulted in a load of “spare” fabric bunching up around my underarms. The fourth was that the pockets were miles too long and I couldn’t reach the bottom of them.
Problem #4 was the easiest fix. I marked how far I could reach into the pockets, with pins, then drew the new pocket bag shape. The pockets had been sewn into the side seams, so I unpicked them to free up the pocket bags and shortened them with the overlocker. Next time I make this dress (really Béa?!) I’ll know to shorten the pocket pieces at the top rather than the bottom. However… Job done, onto the next problem.
Problem #1, the sackery, I decided I could sort out with a couple of darts from under my bust to the waistline. It’s a high waist, not my actual waist! I marked where I wanted the bust darts to start and finish, and pinned them, while I was trying the dress on. Then with it off, I could measure them properly and make sure they were placed symmetrically. I had to unpick the waist seam at the front, and having created the darts, I had to trim off a sliver of fabric at the front, to true it up.
The new darts meant that the bodice waist was a bit smaller, so I took out the old gathering stitches from the skirt front and ran a couple of new ones. It does mean that the front panel is slightly more gathered now than the back panel, but I don’t think anybody is going to notice. I restitched the front waist seam, and that resolved the first problem – Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
Problem #2 was the flappy sleeves, and I decided I needed to take out about 18cm from each sleeve. My solution was to add an inverted box pleat. It’s not a brilliant fix, but it’s better than other options, like hacking that much fabric out from the underarm, which would look terrible, or elasticating the sleeve, which would still leave all the fabric there, bulking out, and wouldn’t really solve my problem. Plus, it’s really not my style. One option that I would consider for another time of making this dress (hahaha!) would be to create a curved shoulder dart at the neckline side of the sleeve, to give the sleeve more shaping, and take out some of the excess fabric. That requires drafting time, and I am impatient and wanted to have a more immediate solution.
I pinned a pleat into place to see how it would look, placing it at the centre of the sleeve. One of the other ladies on the Sewcation suggested moving it slightly to the front, so as to match the centre of the pleat more with my slightly forward shoulders. It was a really good suggestion and we put a pin where she thought the pleat should be positioned, 4cms forward from the centre of the sleeve.
The darts and the pleated sleeves. I probably did the darts a bit closer together than necessary, but it’s already 100% better. Three Problems down, One to go.
It turned out pretty OK, I reckon. It still needed a hem, but I was working on an idea for that.
That left me with problem #3, excess fabric around the underarm area. I was talking with CL about it, and it does seem to be a fundamental problem as far as raglans are concerned. It’s not an impossible problem, it’s fixable, but, for this particular project, I made an executive decision that it was not a big enough problem for me to spend a ton of time on. I reminded myself that this was always intended to be a hopefully wearable toile, and that I would rather have this as a completed wearable garment that I can get some use out of, rather than fettle it to death and never finish it.
I got everything done that I wanted to get done at the Sewcation. All that was left was for me to finish the dress at home:- finishing the neckline facing (because I’d managed to leave one facing piece at home) and hemming the sleeves and hem.
I mentioned further up this post, how pretty the fluffy selvedge of this fabric is. It was definitely too pretty for me not to use it, so I had to work out a way to incorporate this into the hemming. I eventually settled on a cross between bias binding and flat-felling. I trimmed the selvedge at about 2 cm where there was the natural change in the weave. I did some pinning of bits to see how it could work and then I did a small dummy run to make sure it would work. Then I was off… Here’s a classic Béa diagram, having failed to photograph the process:
Basically, I sewed the selvedge fluff apparently upside down on the right side, then tucked the raw edges up and folded the fluff downwards and stitched everything down 1cm away from the fluff.
Sweet!
It all went ahead quite quickly, and I thought it was all finished. However, after one day of wearing, I decided the neckline was a bit flappy, and needed to be topstitched. That was 29th September. All it needed was a quick five minutes on the sewing machine.
That’s all it needed…
It’s taken me two months. TWO MONTHS. I finally got it done on Sunday – 26th November. But I can definitely call this dress finished at last!
And here it is in its final glory!
Here’s the Sleeve Pleat, with the fluffy hemline.
It’s a bit cold to wear right now, but come the Spring, I’ll be very happy to go out in it.
Will I make this pattern again? I really don’t know. I’m a lot more aware of its drawbacks: the lack of shaping in the bodice, the voluminousness of the sleeves, the wodge of excess fabric under the arm from the raglan sleeve. I’m also more aware of what I can (and can’t) do to avoid them in the first place, or to minimise their impact. Having invested this much time on this pattern to get it to work for me, I’m reluctant to just consign it to the bin. It might work better with a more floppy viscose-y fabric than this fairly robust cotton, and look less sacklike. But I haven’t got anything like that in stash right now. We’ll see if any suitably flowing fabric presents itself to me.
That’s a still I’ve ganked from the video. Bianca, of course I will delete if you’re not happy with this
Bianca is a genius when it comes to pattern-modification. She works from her basic pattern blocks, not commercial patterns, so I couldn’t do much about this project until I had a basic knit bodice pattern that I could rely on, but now I that I have got one, it was time to start furkling the pattern.
Before I go any further, if you’re at all interested in how this got made, please watch Bianca’s video, because that gives you a proper step-by-step how-to for this, and it’s so much better than I can show you. Go watch it, it’s really good!
My pattern-modding plan was firstly to add the roll-neck to the neckline of the front and back pieces, secondly to make the shoulder to side asymmetric gather adjustments on the front piece, and finally to add a skirt length to make it a dress. I couldn’t decide at this stage whether to use my usual ¾ sleeves or make them full length. But that was a decision I could leave until later.
The first stage, adding the roll-neck was pretty easy. I measured my neckline and my head, and then checked that my fabric would have enough stretch to let my head through! I added a quarter of the neck measurement (plus seam allowance) to my front and back pieces, which are set up for cutting on the fold. I included extra height to the neck, so that I could self-face it.
Adding the roll-neck – Easy peasy
The second bit, the slashing and spreading, was fun. I used three slash lines, from the shoulder to the opposite side/waist.
Slash lines – So far so good
Then I added a straight, parallel 6cms of width in each slash. It kept my grainline straight. It led to a top half that is a bit like the Tower of Pisa.
Well squiffy!
The final pattern adjustment was to add my usual Skirt add-on piece that I’ve used with all the other dresses I’ve made with my Repro pattern.
When it came to cutting all my pieces out, I double-checked beforehand that I had enough fabric to fit them all. Because of the front piece being distorted out to the side, I wasn’t sure if I could do my usual trick of cutting the front and back side by side. I was using a knit fabric I’d bought on Ebay from Coastal Cloth Collective. I can’t see this exact print available right now, but they have some beautiful jersey prints.
They called it Pink & Purple Floral Confetti
It was sold as 2½ metres, but actually it was 2¾ metres, WIN! That meant that even if I had to place my pattern pieces end to end, I should still have enough. I am a frugal cutter and try to avoid waste, so I measured all the pieces, and did a bit of fabric tetris, and I was able to cut the dress and leave enough for a bonus pair of leggings out of my leftovers. MOAR WIN!
I gathered the shoulder and side gathers, before doing any actual construction. That way I was basically constructing a t-shirt dress as normal but without having to faff around with a neckband. I sewed the shoulder seams which included a nifty self facing method for the roll-neck, from Bianca’s video. Once you’ve sewn the shoulder seams up to the top of the neck, and it’s still inside out, you fold the neck over, as if to seal it up, and stitch in the ditch (where the pin is. I’d already done the right hand side before I remembered to photograph it). Once you turn the dress right side out, it’s magically folded the facing to the inside and is holding it in place.
Burrito Facing
After that the construction was all as normal. I set the sleeves in flat, and sewed the side/sleeve seams, and hemmed the sleeves and hem.
I tried it on.
Trying it on
Not gunna lie, it wasn’t 100% there. It’s annoying to work hard on something only for it to be not quite what you were expecting, but this was always essentially a first time try-out. It was perfectly wearable, and definitely fixable. Time for some tweaks, to get it closer to the picture in my head…
The first tweak was to the neck, which was wrinkly and saggy because it was a bit taller than it should be, especially as I have a very short neck to start off with, and it looks even shorter because of my double chin. Also it was wider than it should be (it needed to be more close fitting) and because of the stretch of this particular fabric, the curve between neck and shoulder had elongated quite a lot, which looked a bit off.
Shoulder good, neck bad
I can make the curve tighter in the pattern, and if need be, stabilise it with some tape when I sew that shoulder/neck seam in future. On this dress, I decided I needed to redo the neck to take about 8cm out of the circumference. There’s plenty of stretch, and I can still get it over my head without having a panic attack. And while I was at it, I could tighten up that neck-to-shoulder curve, and make it a bit shorter.
Neck Adjustment
The other thing I wasn’t wholly in love with is how the side gathers worked out. They’re a bit meh, neither clearly gathered nor clearly straight. The shoulder gathers are great, and stand out well, but the side ones don’t.
Side gather – My face says it all
I think it’s partly because of Proportion. The slash lines were quite close together at the neck but more separated at the side, and since they both had the same amount of extra volume added, it showed up a lot more in the shoulder gather which was 18cm of extra volume into a small space (i.e. a lot of gather), compared to the same 18cm of extra volume into a longer space at the side (i.e. less gather). And since the side gather was nestled into a longer seam, that made it blend in more, not stand out. Next time I play around with slashing and spreading, I’ll remember to factor in Proportion.
I also realise in retrospect that this is such a busy print (which don’t get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE) that the gathers need to be a lot more impactful to get noticed. If I’d done this in a tasteful beige, you’d spot the gathers fine. But I can’t help myself, I love a Big Floral.
I’ve decided that I’m just going to have to live with it on this particular dress. If I don’t mention it, I’m fairly sure nobody else would. But for future makes, I can EITHER lean into the side gathers, adding extra fabric there, by doing a bit more slashing and spreading (which would create an even more weirdly shaped pattern piece!), OR I can turn the gathered side back to the original shape and just have the shoulder gather. Watch this space!
And finally the last thing I wasn’t happy about was those long sleeves. I’d cut them long, just in case it felt like that kind of dress. But no…So I cut them up to my usual ¾ length (40cms usually). Because when you make your own clothes you don’t have to put up with long sleeves that you don’t like.
Here it is, rejigged as much as it’s going to be, and I’m so much happier with it.
Much better now!
So there we go, a learning experience, in pattern-wrangling, in problem-solving, and also in not letting initial disappointment get to me. I’m looking forward to more tinkering by slash and spread!
I’ve been in a massively productive phase just recently. It got kick-started at the end of July, when I went on a Sewcation with the lovely Thrifty Stitcher herself (CL) and Amanda of The Sewcial Studio, and I made a nightshirt and the Not!Barbie jersey dress. I was meant to start on a blazer, but I’m not quite there with that one!
Here’s the nightshirt, by the way. I’m going to blog it properly later, because I have Things I Want To Say. In fact there’s quite a few blogs in my To Do list.
It’s got a slightly goth Hawaiian Shirt vibe
I’ve upcycled a dress I hadn’t ever really liked wearing much, into a top. Again, I want to blog this one, because of Lessons Learned.
I’ve had a bit of a Slash & Spread adventure, making what I’m calling the Bianca dress.
Don’t worry, I’m going to take better pictures
I made the FringeMonster bag, and I’ve started work on another tote bag upcycle, this time with random patchworking.
It’s going to be all black and white
But enough of all those Teasers, here is my latest finished item, this dress was made with a gorgeous jersey from Fabrics Galore (excellent service, highly recommended). As soon as I saw it on their website I had to have it. In particular I had to have it made up into another one of my Jersey dresses. It was right in my Big Floral aesthetic. I thought that once I’d cut it, I would get it finished in an hour or two. But oh no, everything takes longer than you think…
It’s my basic Tee dress that I’ve been loving this summer (making and wearing). I cut the neckline about 5cm lower than my basic pattern, just to change things up a bit. Well, that led to Problems. I cut my neckband longer, to match, but it was a smidge too big, and it turned out gapey, where it need to hug close to the body. I tried pressing it into submission, but it was having none of it.
So I left it for a day and the next evening, I unpicked it. Jersey is really hard to unpick. The stitches just sink into the fabric, and you have to be really careful not to catch the fabric fibres with your unpicker. I cut the neck band down and tried again. It was only when I started the top stitching that I realised I had sewn the band in back-to-front and my back seam was right there at the front of the décolletage. So I unpicked it again. And at least I knew that the band fitted better. Third time’s the charm – it all went in fine. It’s still not perfect, but I’m a pragmatist, and I don’t mind that it’s still a tiny bit gapey at the front, because it’s only really visible to me, looking down. Face on, it’s absolutely fine. There’s only so much unpicking that a fabric can take and still look good.
Aside from ranting a bit about how stupid I had been about the neckband, I wanted to show off my Sleeve innovation, cuff bands!I wanted to hack my sleeves to be a bit more interesting, and decided on these rounded cuffs. I cut four cuff shapes, using the sleeve circumference as the length measurement + 2cm for seam allowance.
Cuff bands
I stitched them together on the curved edge. I snipped Vs into the seam allowance, so that they would keep their curve properly when I turned them right side out.
I thought carefully about where I wanted the gap in the cuff to be positioned on my arm, in relation to the sleeve seam which is on the inner arm. I decided the right position for the gap was towards the front of the arm. That meant placing the centre (back) of my cuffs about ¼ of the way into the sleeve piece, in the back half of the sleeve pattern piece (identifiable by its double notches).
X marks the spot
I was wondering to myself how to attach them to the sleeve end, and decided to keep it quite simple, and add them the same way as I would the neckband. I basically stitched the cuff pieces onto the end of the sleeve, right sides together. I could only do it by turning the sleeves inside out and attaching the cuffs on the inside of the sleeve tube. Maybe I should have tried doing it with the sleeves the right way around, though I honestly don’t think it would have been practically possible. The thickness of the layers of fabric (combined with me possibly having sewn my seam allowances a smidge narrow) created about 1cm of overlap that turns out to be pretty cute, but was not my original intention. It’s now a design feature. Then I turned the sleeves right way round, and topstitched the cuffs down. And voilà!
It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m on my own at home, and not knowing what to do with myself (all presents wrapped and handed over, all food shopping done), I picked up the Purple Velvet Shannon that’s been on my WIP pile for aaaages. This one is at least a year old, because I started it with the intention of it being a possible Christmas dress last year.
This is one of my hacked Simple Sew Shannon Collection dresses. I used a gorgeous stretch velvet that I’d originally bought for dance costume making purposes. I used my sleeve extension pattern piece, which I trialled with my Massive Roses dress, to make the otherwise sleeveless Shannon winter-wearable. I cut it long and quite straight to make it a more elegant line. I originally cut it out and sewed it together during OWOP 2019, as I was on a Shannon with sleeves bender! And then I didn’t get around to doing the hemming. I wanted to hem it with a nice satin bias binding, and I’d got as far as sewing that on, and pinning it in place. All it needed was the hemming. But as I’d missed my Christmas deadline, I sort of forgot about it. Then Covid happened, and my sewjo took a nosedive. I didn’t feel any urge to do anything for months, so this dress sat in the WIP pile. When I occasionally summoned up the courage to look at the pile, it would look back at me, accusingly! “It’s just hemming,” it would say, “you can do that while you’re watching the telly. It won’t take you more than one evening”.
So one evening back in November, I took it out and did that hemming. “Yippee!” I thought, “I’ve got a nice party dress, for all those parties I’m not going to”. Then I tried it on and decided it wasn’t working at all. Firstly the bias binding was making the hem bell out a bit, which was not a look I wanted. It worked fine for the neckline and sleeve hems, but not at the bottom. Secondly, it just didn’t look right long. I took various pictures of me wearing the dress with the hem hoiked up to different levels. From a well-below-the-knee level, I decided it needed to go to mini length.
I decided no 5 was the right length, no 6 is a smidge too far!
And back onto the pile it went…
This afternoon, I decided it could still be a Christmas Dress, so I pulled it out again, and cut a chunk off the bottom. I used a fairly deep herringbone stitch for the hemming. The velvet is quite bouncy, so I thought it would help to keep the hem flat. It would also allow for the stretchiness of the fabric. It takes longer than a basic hemming stitch, but I didn’t have anything else to do particularly.
And all for the sake of this blog, I’ve I’ve even bothered to slap a bit of makeup on, and wear a bra (it’s been a jimjams kind of a day till now), so that you can see the nice dress all finished off…
Unfinished Object now definitely finished – ka-ching!
Béa's Sewing Adventures 