Two and a half years ago I moved with zero notice. We were out of the country on a holiday in Oman. While there the situation back in Ethiopia rapidly deteriorated to the point that we were told not to come back. Several months later we were given the go ahead to return, but by that point the kids were happy and adjusted in a new school so we made the decision for me and them to stay where we were while my husband returned to finish out his contract.
That is a very abbreviated explanation for why I have been living without 95% of both my wardrobe and yarn and fabric stashes for more than two years (and two moves). Fortunately, out household goods shipment arrived at our new home Brazil at the end of December. I must say that it has been very nice to have access to my full wardrobe again.
It didn’t take long to realize that almost of my t-shirts have holes in them and the jersey dresses that I own are almost all from my pre-kid days when I liked my clothes to be tighter and are now uncomfortably snug around my stomach. So why not use one pattern to fill both gaps in my wardrobe?
I made a few t-shirts while we were living in Addis, but I have never kept copious notes for my future self to refer to and surprise of all surprises, after three years I don’t remember what I did. Even though I’ve made the pattern before I was essentially working from scratch.
To prevent that from happening in the future I have decided to take project notes and leave them here for both myself and anyone else who might find them useful.
I wanted the t-shirt dress to have a curved hem, so I grabbed the Stellan Pattern from French Navy. From looking at my old traced pattern pieces I knew that I had previously made an XS, and really liked the way it fit as a t-shirt. But I wanted the dress to be a bit more oversized and not cling to my body so I decided to go with the S and make a t-shirt first to see if that would be enough ease for the dress.
[NOTE: After looking at French Navy’s website it appears that the Stellan Pattern has been updated to expand its size range since I downloaded and printed the pattern. It seems that the measurements have changed slightly in the process. The XS had a 40” fitted bust measurement and was recommend for someone with a 34” bust. The S had a 41.3” finished bust measurement and was recommended for someone with a 35” bust. My bust measurement is 34.5”. In the new sizing this would be somewhere in between a C (with a 39.3” finished bust size suggested for someone with a 34.5” bust) and a D (41” finished bust suggested for someone with a 36.5” bust measurement).]
I was very happy with the fit of the test t-shirt. My hips are the same size as my chest so in theory anything that fits over one should fit over the other. My original plan was to just extend the pattern 12” from the lengthen/shorten line. But I really didn’t want the dress to cling to my hips though and decided to err on the side of caution by sizing the bottom portion of the pattern up to an M. Those are the only two alterations made to turn the Stellan Tee into a dress.
I am so very pleased with how this turned out. The fabric is on the heavier side. Embarrassingly, it took me twenty minutes of trying to determine which was the right side of the fabric to work out that it was, in fact, double knit. Given that it was 11:00 at night and the lighting was bad I will cut myself a break on that. But the extra structure in the fabric combined with sizing up helped me pull off exactly what I was looking for here.
And while I was sewing the dress I cut out and sewed another tee for good measure (I did mention that my t-shirt all have holes in them, right?).