Technically, I made this dress last fall (although it didn’t get hemmed until January) and remade it this year. It started out as a mash-up: Amber Corcoran’s Fen top spliced onto the lower half of Liesl Gibson’s Gallery Dress. (I.e., my beloved linen dress.) I had ensmallened the neckline — most neckholes in the world are too big for my liking — and changed the dress:sleeve proportion. I’m pretty sure I used the size 10 body and size 4 armhole and sleeve. The idea was to keep the dolman sleeve from being too dolman. And it turned out to be a really cute, really comfortable dress. But what I mean by too dolman is I wanted to be able to put a vest or cardigan or jacket over it. It worked, in a sense — I could put a cardigan over it — but it was still just too much fabric to really work as a layering piece. And as cute as it was on its own, for me and the way I like to dress, that’s too limited to live.
So I cut off the sleeves.
It was a total hack job and there’s no reason it should have worked out so well, so I’m chalking it up to beginner’s luck. But it really did work out well. The armholes lay nicely, and I repeated the Fen neckband treatment (which I really love) around the armholes. And now I’m happily wearing this dress under and over everything. But I said it at the time and feel it very strongly looking at these pics: I really wish I could have it both ways!
I also added a little pocket before calling it done, just because it was so plain. I’m planning to redraw my pattern for this from the ground up and make it again, and I have visions of big cargo pockets with flaps. I almost added them to this one, but it was just too much with the stripes. So we’ll see if that happens on a future iteration.
Patterns: Fen and Gallery Tunic + Dress
Fabric: Unknown blue cotton shirting (purchased as remnant from Imogene+Willie)
Cost: Fen pattern $20 (Gallery is a reuse) + $10 fabric = $30
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PREVIOUSLY in FOs: Quick black raglan pullover