Choose Your Adventure Dress
This is a dress I ended up making for a friend of a friend who’s 5yo was having an extremely bad time. Since I hate making children’s clothing that might be too small I did size up to a size 6 (the photos have my 6yo daughter modelling the dress).
Overall Thoughts
It’s a reasonably simple and quick sew up with a good amount of options, a good tutorial for those that want it, and pockets! The sizing for this seems reasonably accurate (although it is a loose fitting garment so there is plenty of forgiveness). Minky with low stretch probably isn’t the best idea for sleeves, although it would be fine if you are making it for someone on the petite size.
I’ll definitely be trying out some of the other options that come with this in the future.
Pattern options and my choices
There are a lot of options for this pattern! This time I made the dress length, colour blocked back, plain front with pockets, a cuffed neckline and long sleeves.
Fabric
The fabric I used is some tie dyed minky and the pink is 240g/ms cotton lycra. This minky has only a little bit of stretch to it, around 20%, which seems to work fine for this pattern as it is a loose fit (the sleeves are a tiny bit snug). The cotton lycra has much greater stretch, 75%, which is why I used it for the bindings, the minky would not work to bind the pockets or as the neck cuff – but would have been fine if I wanted to use it as the pocket pieces.
Machines used and settings
The pockets and hemming was done on my Singer 4411 with a walking foot. Needle was a schmetz 80/12 jersey and the topstitching was a zig zag that had a width of 4 and length of 2.5.
The rest of the garment was constructed on my Janome My Lock 644D (overlocker/serger) with schmetz super stretch HAx1 SP 90/14 needles in. The best colour I had to blend into the tie dye minky was some pale pink which I used in the needles, and some generic grey cones in the loopers.
Pros and Cons
Sleeves are cut on fold, which if using cotton lycra or french terry (something with plenty of stretch) would probably work fine, with the minky the fit was just a tad tight and…. just a little bit twisty.
There is a great pattern piece guide in the tutorial which helps so much when you are only printing out some pieces and are trying to figure out which pages go where (the only thing missing is having the actual document page numbers on the guide, i.e. you need to add 28 to the page number on the guide to get the page number in the document to print out the page you want).
For those printing at home there is also a handy list on page 4 which outlines which pages to print depending on what options you are making up, this can save a whole lot of printing and sticking depending on what you have decided to make.
The pattern has layered sizes, great to save a whole lot of ink.
There are pockets!
This pattern has a heap of options, including a hood or cowl, 5 different sleeves, T-shirt length and more.
The tutorial that comes with the pattern has plenty of detail and lots of photos to follow, 25 pages of them.
Things to try next time
Next time I’m thinking I might try it as more of a T-shirt dress with lighter material and the bell sleeves.
Will definitely look for some better contrasting material for the pockets. Once it all went together I feel that the pink just doesn’t stand out nicely against the tie dye.
