Hey friends! I haven’t posted anything here since October?! Well, now you can probably see why! 😉 I am currently 18 weeks pregnant, and we moved to Washington state (hence all of the pine trees). I was really sick all through November and December, plus we had to pack up our entire house before taking off to visit our extended families for the holidays. It’s been a little more than I can process lately, but we’re in our new house now, and we’re almost all the way unpacked, so I decided I deserved to do something I wanted to do, and this blog post was it!
This is the Joanne Faux Wrap Dress by Sinclair Patterns. They let me choose any one of their patterns in exchange for a review of the pattern. When I saw this dress, I knew I would be making it pronto! I actually made it at the beginning of December when I wasn’t feeling very good, but I really wanted a new dress to wear that would be maternity and nursing friendly.
I cut and traced the pattern, cut the fabric, prepped my machines, and sewed this entire dress in one day. And remember how I wasn’t feeling very good? Well I was NOT going fast at all, and I wasn’t even planning on finishing it in one day, but when dinner time rolled around, I was finished!
The thing that made tracing this pattern SO easy was that I didn’t make ANY adjustments! Sinclair Patterns has all of their patterns in petite, regular, or tall – so I chose the tall version of this pattern and I’m very happy with it! One thing I sort of changed was just to trace all the way down to the last size so that it would be as long as possible, and it was a little bit too wide for my tracing paper, so I brought the side seam angle in a little bit. One thing I would change for next time is to make the sleeves 1″-2″ longer. They are a pretty good length, but I tend to pull them down during the day since the ride up to my elbow.
I’m always a bit weary when trying out new pattern companies, because I never know how it’s going to turn out. Thankfully I experienced ZERO frustration in making this dress or understanding the instructions. I found everything that I needed, and they had all of the information very organized and easy to find. One thing that I thought was interesting, and I was glad that I figured out, was that they have the fabric requirements all separated (ei. sleeve fabric, bodice fabric, skirt fabric). So just make sure you add all of those together before you start cutting to make sure you have enough fabric for the version you are making.
All of my ‘worrying if it was going to turn out good’ was in vain, because as you can see, the dress fits really well and I was so relieved when I tried it on and loved it!
I used a rayon/spandex (92%/8%) for this dress and it work really well. I’m not a huge fan of rayon spandex, since it doesn’t really smooth things out very well and it gets really wrinkly, but it worked out fine since the negative ease in the pattern stretches out the wrinkles and it hangs kind of heavily.
If you want to see another knit wrap dress, I also made the Wren Dress a few years ago and it turned out really pretty too. Happy faux wrap dress sewing!
