Linen summer dress

Well I'm ready for Summer even though it is months away, with my new black linen printed sleeveless dress.

Ok let me explain! My friend C is getting into sewing more and comes round to my sewing room so we can work on projects together.

It has been great working with her. Her aesthetic is different to mine and she wants to try all sorts of techniques, so helping her is really keeping me on my toes.

She loves the style of Gretchen “Gertie” Hirsch and has several of her books including "Gertie sews Jiffy Dresses"

She decided she would like to sew the Popover dress from the book (its the one on the cover), but without the shoulder bows and pockets, but with waistline shirring.

I don't have a photo of her dress, which we made from a black floral viscose that draped beautifully but was a challenge to cut out!

We split the sewing between 2 sessions, so in between I managed to cut out a version for myself and partly sew it up, finishing it after we'd finished C's dress.

Sizing: the popover dress has a lot of ease so we went on the finished garment measurements in the book, and chose a size which allowed a little bit of ease. This was 2 sizes smaller than indicated by our measurements.

Layout: We did not use either of the cutting layouts given in the book. 

C's fabric had an obvious directional print, so we cut the 4 pieces out single layer, making sure to flip the pattern piece to have pairs (and not all left side pieces!). This used more fabric than the book indicates.

Here's a photo of C's fabric and the shirring, I don't have one of the whole dress.

My fabric was very limited yardage (2 metres of 150 cm wide), but as the floral print looked OK in any direction I wasn't limited to one direction. So I folded the fabric crossways and cut the pieces out with the centre front on the diagonal, I had to narrow the skirt very slightly to fit it on. The bias sleeve facings came from the centre, and I even managed to cut some inseam pockets from the corners. As the side seams on my dress were on the cross grain, it was nice and stable and able to support the pockets.

Shirring: C was very keen to have the shirred waist option, and it really gives the dress shape, so definitely a good call. I copied! Although there is a line for the shirring marked on the pattern, I got C to try the dress on, added an elastic belt and then marked (with a sliver of soap) where we wanted the shirring to go. We started with 7 rows of shirring, but increased it to 10.

I marked mine in a similar way and also did 10 rows of shirring. Here's a shot of the inside of my dress.