Everyone has one piece of clothing in their wardrobe that fits them like a glove and they never want to get rid of! My version of that was a lilac shift dress that I bought from New Look years
and years and years (and years!) ago! I wore it to special occasions, to work and a lot of things in-between and eventually became a bit embarrassed that I’d had it so long and so relegated it to the back of my wardrobe.
More recently I decided I wanted a shift dress to wear again so decided to re-create the lilac one by turning it into a pattern to use with other fabric. Here’s how I did it…..
· Firstly I took my quick un-picker and unpicked all of the seams on the original garment. Luckily it was quite a basic dress with just side seams, shoulder seams, darts, a facing and a zip in the back so it didn’t take too long.
· Once all of the pieces were separated out, I ironed them all with the seam allowances folded inside (so I could add my own consistent size seam allowance on later).
· I then took a piece of paper, layed out each of the pieces, one at a time and carefully traced around each one. As the seam allowances were folded inside, I was effectively tracing out the stitching lines of each piece.
· I then took all pattern pieces and added half an inch to all lines for my seam allowance and my hem.
· I traced the darts from the original fabric piece onto the paper pattern by placing wax tracing paper on top of the pattern paper face down and then carefully placing the fabric pattern piece on top making sure all edges were aligned. I then took my tracing wheel and traced out the folded lines of the dart which were still visible despite ironing
I now had my lilac dress in pattern form. I then went ahead and used those paper pattern pieces to cut out a new dress in fabric. I was reasonably confident that it would fit me fine as it was made from my previous dress but I used an inexpensive cotton type fabric just in case. This is how it came out…..
I wore this one a few times to assess the fit and then decided to make a few adjustments to the pattern to make the fit even better…..
· I wanted the skirt section to be slightly more fitted around my hips and thighs so I put the dress on inside out, stood in front of the mirror and pinned the side seams to get the fit I wanted.
I then went back to the pattern and marked on the paper pattern where the pins were on the dress. I then drew a line half an inch out from there and merged it with the original seam allowance further up the skirt
· In addition to that the skirt was still fairly straight and I prefer a pencil skirt style. So I took about an inch off the bottom of each side seam and
graded back up to the hip line. I've included a picture from 'Building Patterns - The Architecture of Women's Clothing' - an excellent pattern making book by Suzy Furrer - which shows how to do the the 'pencil' adjustment.
· The front neckline fitted perfectly but the back had a bit of gape to it. So this time, I put the dress on my mannequin (because it’s hard to fit your own back!) which is fairly close to my own measurements and again pinned out the excess. I played around with the placement of the excess and in the end decided to try and line it up with the existing back darts which meant I could just sew one very long extended dart on each side. This is probably not the correct way to do this adjustment but it worked fine for me! Again I transferred those markings onto my paper pattern
Finally I made the dress up again incorporating my adjustments and am really happy with the result! I used a lovely wool bought from Sew Much to To in Ely, Cambridgeshire and interlined it with some cotton sateen type material in my fabric stash.
So it just goes to show….just because your favourite piece of clothing is tired and past its best, it can live on again in another fabric with a little bit of time and effort!
Have you re-created any shop bought clothes? How did you get on?
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