Planning and Design
Last year I bought some Style Arc dress patterns to make dresses for Niece #2’s birthday, but they didn’t quite turn out how I was expecting (not because of my sewing technique, but because of the design of the dresses themselves). So this year I wanted to find a more t-shirt-y type of dress and found two from the blog Scattered Thoughts of a Crafty Mom. Amazingly, they were also free. I also bought some remnant fabric from Wattle Hill Fabrics in November when I realised that I better start planning now if I wanted to sew these over the Christmas break, in time for her birthday.
It was nice that the two patterns were designed for different weight fabrics. I bought the two fabrics because they were pink (her current favourite colour) and one was a lightweight pointelle and the other was a medium weight french terry. So it took the decision making out of assigning a fabric to each pattern.
Materials
- Pattern
- Girl’s Perfect T-Shirt Dress (Scattered Thoughts of a Craft Mom)
- Fabric
- European Cotton Pointelle Jersey – Knit – Taffy (Wattle Hill Fabrics)
- Thread
- Maraflex col. 382
Sustainability Check
👍 Fabric is 100% cotton so biodegradable
👍 Maraflex is also biodegradable 🎉
Construction
I got a bit confused choosing a size as it was done by height and weight and in imperial as well haha. I chose the size based on height as I had that in Stash Hub, and this was confirmed when my sister-in-law gave me Niece #2’s weight.
I was going to use white overlocking thread but I had recently just changed it to black (to mend Niece #1’s school skirts), which was a bit of an ordeal because my knot came undone so I had to manually thread one of the spools (not fun) and I just couldn’t be bothered changing it back. But also, the pointelle means that you would be able to see the white thread through the mini holes, which I didn’t want. Given knits don’t fray, and my niece will probably outgrow these pretty quickly, I decided to forgo any finishing on the raw edges. Instead I just topstitched all seams down, which is consistent with what I did with the last lot of dresses (since my niece doesn’t like things rubbing against her skin).
Since the fabric was likely not 30% stretch I used the 85% neckline binding method. I also dropped the neckline of the front by 2cm since it seemed a little high, and if Niece #2 is anything like me, she will hate the constricted feeling of a high neckline.
I was a little bit worried that even with the Maraflex, the topstitching resulted in wavy looking hems. But a bit of steaming with the iron mostly removed this.
Reflections
Unrelated to the sewing itself but since this is a free pattern and didn’t come with line art, I just found a random t-shirt dress one from google images and used that…
Things I learnt:
- I think I actually don’t really like pointelle. It’s super cute but I feel like it’s too light weight to be enjoyable to sew with, and you have to take into account the holes when using things like interfacing. I like how you can get it in 100% cotton, but this means even though it’s a knit it doesn’t have much stretch/recovery. I have two more pointelle fabrics in my stash but after that I will probably avoid buying this type of fabric.
Categories: Sewing
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