Cloning a Dress

I’ve been looking for “quick” projects recently, and I’ve been itching to sew. There are a lot of things I really enjoy about sewing as a broad category of creative endeavour. Many of you who know me will know that I enjoy embroidery, making small items like dog toys, and recently, quilting. I find the entire process to be really satisfying all around. Drafting a pattern works my brain, and there is always something new to learn. Pinning and cutting a pattern gets me really excited about a project, though I do find the actual cutting process to be rather tedious. When seams start going in, things start to feel really real - I can actually see what I’m making. Finishing work is often rather meditative for me. There’s usually some amount of hand sewing, which I really enjoy. I know that hand sewing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I really find it rather enjoyable. Since I stuck my toe into quilting last year, I’ve also been really interesting upping my hand sewing skills. It’s been a fun journey, and our dogs have been inundated with new plush dog toys.

In the past, I have made my own clothes. Typically, I’ve drafted a pattern from scratch, but I was gifted a wonderful wrap dress a couple of years ago. It’s one of my go to clothing items during the Spring and Summer. In short, I love it and would wear daily if I could. The dress reminds me of fun times with friends in the pre-pandemic days. It is also a lovely reminder of a wonderful friend who has since moved away. It’s a nice boost. Wrap dresses are pretty simple, and very forgiving. I thought this might be a great dress to pattern, and since the whole dress is less than 10 pieces it would likely be quick to put together.

My entire approach to life is to jump in immediately, so I grabbed the dress, rolled out my giant roll of butcher paper, and began laying out my dress. The skirt panels are very simple and the dress is quite thin, so I was able to gently press a pencil against each seam a make a light mark on the paper. There so so many methods available online for copying your clothes, and the method I used is not the most accurate by any stretch of the means. That said, this is a wrap dress, and there are some things I will change about the pattern in the future. I was mostly looking for the broadest shapes that I could clean up with the drafting tools I have on hand.

You can see where I made tick marks on the paper and then used the rulers I have to make clean lines. The lighting isn’t the best, but I never thought about how difficult it is to photograph white paper.

If you’ve ever done pattern drafting, you know that there a million things that you have to do before you even get to cutting it out. Since the larger shapes are essentially worked out, I remembered to true up the pattern BEFORE I made a mock up. It’s more important for the bodice seams to align since it’s the only fitted part of the garment, but I did check to make sure that the long skirt seams were the same length as well. Since the construction of the skirt is pretty simple, I didn’t bother with things like balance marks. The general plan was to line up the straight edges of the bodice, the center fold on the back skirt panel, and the long edges of the side skirt pieces on the straight grain. Again, this is a very forgiving pattern.

Here you can see where I finished the bodice pieces and started laying out the fabric and pinning the pattern pieces to it. I did make a quick mock up out of muslin before I started in on the fabric just to make sure things fit appropriately.

If you’re wondering why all the pattern pieces are so far apart, I don’t don’t draft my patterns with any sort of seam allowance. I do this for a couple of reasons. I like really timeless pieces of clothing, so the patterns I have tend to be reused. The type of fabric I’m using will usually decide how I finish the raw edges of the seams, and so I like to add seam allowance when I have the pattern piece on the fabric. I also end up with an outline of the net pattern piece, so I have a guideline while I’m sewing. It also works out well as a quick guide for heming and finishing. I have a clear quilting ruler that I use. It’s really easy to line up the straight bits to a line for even seam allowances. I also label my pieces. I learned the hard way that even though you THINK you’ll remember what piece is what, you really, really don’t.

I used French seams for the majority of this dress. It’s a fairly lightweight cotton that came together pretty quickly once I had all the pieces made. I completed this project over the course of two days. I’m really pleased with how it turned out, and now I have a second dress that I love and it makes me think of fun times spent with friends. Even though things in the world around us are moving towards normal, I still need these little boosts to get me through. Besides, puppy kisses are the best.