The Pointy Dress

Every now and then you come across a pattern that is just perfect. For me perfection includes a heavy dose of quirkiness, or weirdness, depending on your point of view. But I assume that you are a kindred spirit if you are reading my blog. So let me introduce the Pointy Dress. I came across the original pattern in an Italian sewing magazine called La Mia Boutique. I loved a lot of their patterns, but since that one fabulous issue I bought their style direction has changed to a more mainstream aesthetic. I kept buying more issues when I could get my hands on them, but always ended up disappointed. Pity, but I bet they sell more magazines by catering to mainstream tastes. Anyway, here are the pics that captured my heart:

As it happened I had a striped interlock in my stash and so of course I traced out the pattern and made my own version. I reviewed the pattern here.

And below is the shape of the garment. You tuck in the pointy bits on the skirt, which makes a sort of little pocket, although I don’t think it is very usable as such, and provided your fabric is reasonably drapey the skirt will collapse into soft folds. You can also let the points stick out, but I prefer them tucked in.

However, the pattern was unnecessarily complicated. It had a two-part yoke with a seam at centre front and centre back, then three parts for the skirt, with diagonal seams going from the centre of the yoke to the sides. If you have a good look at the pic just above this one you can see a seam going from the bottom of the left scarf end to the left side seam. This makes it difficult to match stripes, and anyway, why not cut the back and front of the dress as single pieces? I do like simplicity.

I also didn’t like the dropped shoulders and the sleeves are unnecessarily wide at the top where they join the bodice. I always feel that if you have a lot of volume in a garment, as is the case with the skirt of this dress, the fit in the bust, shoulders and sleeves should be quite close to compensate.

So the next time I made this dress I used my TNT t-shirt pattern, Burda 3197, for the bodice part and sleeves, then frankenpatterned with the original La Mia Boutique pattern from below the bust downwards. I also joined up all the skirt pieces of the LMB pattern to make one pattern piece for the whole front. With this sort of garment it is not necessary to be too precise for the skirt part. 10cm more or less are neither here nor there. The back pattern piece is the same as the front, just with a higher neckline. I have also overlaid the dress pattern with the t-shirt pattern so you can see how it is frankenpatterned.

With the sleeves from the t-shirt the dress looks like this in grey ponte.

And like below you can see it in black ponte, with or without scarf. I wore this with a string of pearls to a family funeral recently and it impressed one of the rellies so much that she got all keen to take up sewing again. The more the merrier, I say.

If you like the style but do not want to draft your own pattern, the StyleArc Toni dress is something very similar. It has a CF and CB seam and a v-neck with collar, plus cut-on cap sleeves. The latter may suit you better than long sleeves if you live in the northern hemisphere where it is of course summer at the moment. You can also leave the collar off and just have a v-neck, or do whatever you like. We are sewists after all, we can please ourselves.

You can see the pattern pieces of the Toni more clearly below.

StyleArc have an Etsy store for downloads as well if you are not in Australia and don’t want to wait for the paper pattern to arrive in the mail. I am not affiliated, of course, just happy to point those interested in the right direction.