Tiered Linen Dress

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This summer was relatively cool for Tokyo, but by the time July came around the familiar sweltering, humid days and nights made a reappearance, and I was back to sweating through work clothes and dreaming of linen and cotton.

By the time my desire for a linen dress bloomed into full desperation, the stores had moved on to fall fashion. So I decided to make my own.

I had the idea for a tiered sleeveless dress in lavender linen, which is how I came across this tutorial from Merricksart.

Although I followed it for making of the tiers, I drafted my own pattern using my basic block, and sleeves inspired by the pic below.

To draft the bodice pieces, I approximated the minimum width necessary to pull the dress past my shoulders because I planned to go without a zipper. The waistband was fitted with an elastic band, which creates the A-line figure anyway.

For the creation of the tiers, each tier must be gathered, then sewn together. The top tier is gathered, and also sewn to an elastic band. While my top is obviously quite different, I also differed in choice of fabric, which led to a modified elastic and tier construction from Merrick’s tutorial.

Linen is a relatively heavy weight fabric, and attempting to gather was challenging. Since I am not fond of sewing elastic bands directly to fabric (it looks cheap in my humble opinion, or at least I am not skilled at it), I decided to go with a paperbag waistband using this tutorial (which I shall definitely try again to make shorts in the summer!) since I would use the excess fabric to sew my bodice. However, because of this choice, the fabric doubled over was very difficult to gather!

After a dismal failure, I plucked out the threads and stuffed a piece of ribbon through the “paperbag” top, and voila I had a gather.

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For the sleeves, I made a rough estimate of the desired pleat length, then doubled the fabric length to allow for the folds.

Looking back on my finished dress, I do wonder if I should have made the sleeves tucked under the armhole, or sewn front-to-front as usual, but I think I will wait until the summer to try it out in practice before making any such changes.

All-in-all it was a fun project.