Hi everyone,
Last year, I was lucky enough to win a prize in dress week for Indie pattern month over on The Monthly Stitch. My prize was 3 PDF patterns from Named Clothing. This came at a fortunate time as along with their new book, Named Clothing are my new obsession. Their patterns are so innovative, really well thought-out and just a little bit different.
One of the patterns I chose was the Stella shirt and dress. It has an option for a shirt, with a really funky triangular collar and for a lovely floaty dress with elasticated waist. They have a raglan style sleeve with cuffs and a pussy bow collar option. I was keen to try this to continue to expan my skills with making shirts. I opted for the shirt version and used a really cool viscose style fabric I got from Ebay.
The collar was surprisingly simple to sew up in the end, though I do think it has turned out a little wonky somehow. The pattern calls for poppers but I opted for button holes and made self-covered buttons, which are one of my favourite things to make, as they’re super relaxing. I used blue poppers to make the fastenings on the cuffs.
My thoughts on the pattern; it’s another great, stylish and youthful pattern as I’ve come to expect from Named Clothing. However, for me, it slightly lacks shape and if I made it again I would add some darts and shaping. I’m also not overly keen on the folded cuff option and would complete pleats in the sleeves before adding the cuffs in the traditional way next time.
I have not ruled out making a dress version though and my love for Named Clothing patterns remains!
It all seemed to be going so well and I didn’t have the ‘this doesn’t look right’ feeling but that was such a mistake, as it turned out that I had turned the packets in instead of out. I didn’t realise this until I came to the collar and it was about 1 and a half inches too short on each side. So… I unpicked the right side and had to do the left side again as I had already done the button holes (gggrrr) Anyway, that solved that, so I moved on. I was dreading the collar but I felt it went really well as I followed the instructions and the tutorial. I found doing the button holes really therapeutic, which was a good job as I did them twice! I chose these really cool metal buttons to go with it, I wasn’t sure whether they would look cheap or trendy but I decided on the latter.. My father-in-law pointed out that they look like little screws.
