February’s Me-Made Dress
February is the month of loooooove… so this soft floral romantic style dress was perfect choice for this months me-made dress!! Actually this is the dress that started me sharing my dress project to Tiktok (and about 21k people fell in love with it and this project) and I get asked where I bought it from which is always a nice compliment to someone who sews their own clothes.
This dress is entirely made out of rectangles which made it so easy for me to put together!! And as a bonus, shirring (the gathering of the top part) is fashionable again at the moment and is perfect for beginner sewers. Stitching all of the rows with the shirring elastic does take a loooong time (and I ran out of elastic too which delayed it being finished for a few days) but the flowly skirt and fitted bodice is something I love as it suits my narrow waist but wide hips body shape.
I managed to overcome my fear of adding different sleeve types to dresses with these puff sleeves. Thank you to some youtube tutorials from Rosery Apparel who has a heap of sleeve tutorials including ones like these using elastic at the shoulder to hold the dress on and then at the wrist/forearm to create the puff! And because of that I end up having two dress in one – I can choose to wear the sleeves off the shoulder or pull them up like a normal sleeve. Most of the time I wear there somewhere between the two.
- Pattern – Self Drafted (Inspo Tutorial from Rosery Apparel)
- Fabric – 3 metres Floral Cotton – Spotlight (on clearance)
- 5mm elastic – East Coast Fabric
- Shirring Elastic – Spotlight
Below is a super rough sketch of the pattern pieces I used for this dress design (without seam allowances and a little bit crooked). Please note, this is not a proper dress pattern or tutorial, but more a document of my process through this journey to make one dress a month for 2022.
My other Me-made dresses
