I really love this Marcy Tilton skirt.

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You can read my previous blog posts out it here and see a couple of my versions below.

rust MT skirt2  MT skirt with navy tunic

But I always thought that this skirt shape would make an awesome bottom part to a dress. I had 3m of a cheap cotton bought at a Spotlight sale on hand, so I thought why not give it a try?

The bodice part of the dress would have to be simple, with all the drama and volume going on lower down. So I used my trusty Eva dress bodice again, my go-to pattern which fits me well in the shoulders, armscyes and bust, and combined it with the skirt part lower down. There was a fair bit of winging-it going on in the middle, as you can see from the photo.

cutting out
The Eva pattern piece, traced on paper because you need the full version, not just half with an assymmetric pattern, placed on one end, and the main pattern piece of the skirt on the other. A lot of fudging to make the two meet up as a dress. I misjudged the length I had to add in the middle and the dress turned out a little longer than I intended, I would have preferred tea length, but I think I can live with it as it is.

I followed the principle of ‘fitted at the top and freewheeling and loose lower down’, which is my usual approach to Lagenlook dresses. It did not turn out too bad at the first try, but I took in the sides a bit more from armscye to high hip to accentuate the bubble lower down. Otherwise the dress looks just straight up and down with a bit of rounding off at the hem. As it is, because of the printed fabric, the bubble construction gets rather lost, even after I topstitched all the bubble seams for emphasis. Maybe I should hand pick these style lines with a green embroidery cotton on top of the stitching, like a hand picked zipper. Not sure to be honest, I will need to marinate that idea for a while.

I added some volume to the skirt in parts to keep it in proportion with the upper part of the dress. As for the nitty-gritty of the sewing process, you can read all about it on Pattern Review.

MT skirt dress4MT skirt dress1MT skirt dress4

Looking at the photos I think I could also have put in a dropped waist seam and joined the skirt to that. I have a bit of a tummy these days, so I don’t wear tight-waisted styles any more, but a dropped waist is more roomy and would look ok at high hip level. A bit of a flange would be a nice detail at that point. I might try this again in a plain linen with those changes. In the photo below there is a bit of a horizontal white patch at waist level, which almost looks like a seam there, which gave me the idea.

MT skirt dress5