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| Dress no 7. |
I've set up an instagram account (quite late right?) and you can follow me there; my username is minttu_chocolate
This year has been already quite busy and I've been doing some much different things during the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020
Now I'm working on a clay-headed doll with a fabric body, but I'll post about that later...
This post is about my dress-making journey and my thoughts about sewing your own dresses.
So I really like shirt dresses, I've bought shirtdresses for years. Probably one dress per year
They are quite practical and there a lots of variations in colours.
And of course I've wanted to make a perfect dress for myself for ages. I wanted it to be fitted on the shoulders, with pockets, good buttons and belt. I have a lot what I want from my dress.
I've been sewing about fifteen years now, so I kinda now what my skills are and how to use them in dressmaking. I've made a lot dresses, trust me, a lot (formyself, for dolls and for little sisters). I had an amazing (and expensive) Marimekko Unikko fabric I wanted to use and didn't want to spend it for a dress I wouldn't use. But I wasn't really prepare on how many mistakes and practice runs I had to sew, before getting a nice dress. Even my wedding dress wasn't this hard to do (okay I had a time limit in that one).
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| Dress no. 5 |
I have had a picture of a shirt dress in my head for ages: fitted on the shoulders, with a good collar and pockets, real shirt sleeves and loose on the waist so I can gather the with a belt. A basic
shirtdress! Dress no. 5 is made with the fabric I first had in mind.
2) Find a good pattern or patterns (and you might want to prapere to spend some money in the process)
This took ages and I still haven't found one, some patterns are very close, but not quite. I bought few patterns and magazines (some of them for 20cents and some of them 8 euros..., and I even made a subscription to Ottobre-magazine, and that is a different story.) In every pattern there were somethings that weren't quite right. The shoulders weren't fitted, the sleeves looked odd, the collar wasn't right, there back piece pattern was made from tho separate pieces and so on. I ended up using two patterns for all the dresses I made and that is one reason why I ended up with so many dresses.
3) Adjustments and readjustments aren't that hard, but require practice and redoing
- The first practice dress (dress no. 1) was a flop. The fabric was nice and I wanted to end up with a wearable dress, but I messed up the shoulders and the collar in the end by trying to get a more fitted look on the shoulders. I used a pattern from 90s magazine and tried to lengthen it with a pattern from a newer magazine. In the end I didn't even finish the buttonholes, the dress didn't fit at all. So I trashed it, or actually I might use the fabric later for some other project.
-So I was quite obsessed with the shoulders and managed to get the shoulders and back almost right for the dresses 2-4 quite nicely. But for the number 4 the back was a bit too fitted (and it was made out of the unikko fabric), it is wearable but not perfect at all. And then I made a fifth dress and somehow the backpiece and the shoulders became too tight, I redrew my pattern pieces and somehow ended up with smaller pieces than before.
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| My first practice dress |
4) Pay attention to details!
- This one is an important one!
-The finishing of seams and buttonholes gives your dress a professional look and sometimes good finishing of seams gives more time to use the dress.
- Measure the distance between buttonholes
- Pay attention how the print of the fabric is located, the floral print was a though one to tackle. In my 4th dress I had to sew the buttons to the wrong side, because the print looked so much bette. My 7th dress was much better because the flower aligned almost perfectly in the front.
- I spent actually a lot of time trying to find the metallic buttons I now use, but the buttons had to just the right kind.
5) Check out tutorials on parts that you are not familiar with
- For me it was the collar and the sleeves, I did few practice runs on plain fabric before the sleeves. It really helped me out, sometimes written instructions are just too hard, but with pics or a video it is so much easier.
6) Have a clear picture of what are the steps of the instruction
- If you are using pieces mashed up from different patterns remeber to have a list of what are the sewing steps of a dress. I kinda learn the steps from reading so many shirtdress patterns. My list was something like this:
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| Dress number 4. |
2. Pockets to sides
3. Shoulder and side seams.
4. Sleeve cuffs
5. Attaching sleeves
6. Button stand
7. Collar
8. Buttonholes
9. Belt
7) Remeber try the dress on or use a fitting doll
This is an important step with practice dresses and it gives you an idea on how long you want the sleeves be or how big the darts should be, or are the pattern pieces any good at all. The dress number 6 was probably the biggest disaster, the fabric was actually quite hard to sew, it was thick and slick at the same time. I though that I could give to my smaller size sister, but it just wasn't worth finishing.
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| Dress no. 5 |
- Try something new with the practice versions, a harder to sew fabric or a print you normally don't were or a colour that you haven't used.
- I'm not a big fan of orange, I just don't use and like it in general. Because my local fabric store had a sale and the best fabrics were orange I decided to step out of my comfort zone and try doing something else than blue. Those two dresses I made from orange fabric looked actually pretty good on me. Of cours those two dresses have small details I would fix and made differently to the next versions.
- I've kinda accepted it that my taste in prints and colours has actually changed. Five years ago a floral Unikko dress wasn't my idea of a pretty dress.
9)Remember to take a break when sewing, but not for too long 😅
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| Dress no. 6 |
- I was so frustrated after my first attempt of the shirtdress that it took me over a year to try again, I had looked for patterns, but never tried to sew. Don't give up, even if the firs attempt is a fail.
- After my stupid measuring mistakes with the pattern pieces of the dress no.6 I decided to make the dress no. 7 quickly enough, because I didn't want to forget the alterations I had to do, and it was a good thing in the end.
10) Pick a goodquality fabric for the final dresses
- The cheapest fabric is not always the best choice, it is a good choiche for the mockups, but for the "final" dress I advise to invest in good quality fabric. Thick cotton or a cotton that has some elastic fibers are a good choice. Sewing a shirt dress takes time, I can now finish a dress probably in two days, when taking chores and eating and sleeping into cosideration.
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| Dress no. 2 |
So those are the things that I learnt and as a bonus I made a small list of the mistakes you need to try to avoid:
1 Forgetting to wash you cotton before cutting and sewing
2. Cutting the pieces without checking the orientation of the print (This is tricky with the front pieces, because of the button stand)
3. Sewing the sleeve slits into the wrong direction (I did this once and yes it bother me still)
4. Not remembering to iron the folded seam allowances as mentioned in the pattern (I had to cut new shirt cuffs once!)
5. Beign careless with the buttonholes(either sewing them too small or messing up the direction of the buttonhole)
With love
-Minttusuklaa
