Closet Core Patterns Elodie dress review

Mar 27

Mar 27 Maxi length Elodie dress

I made an Elodie before Christmas and I've been meaning to make a second one ever since. One of the pattern sample is a maxi length one in a viscose, so when Minerva had some new prints on their Minerva exclusive viscose range, I jumped on it. This print is called layered blooms and it's really fun and summery.

This is a mash up of views A and B of the pattern, short sleeves and maxi length. It says you need 4.6 metres, for the first dress I made I only just squeezed it into what fabric I had by narrowing the skirt, but for some reason this time I ended up with loads left over. Possibly even enough for a small shell top! I could have done it in even less as well if I had shortened the skirt pieces to start off with. 4m should definitely be enough

I found this quite difficult to sew, tbh, as is always the case with viscose. Worth it in the end but a pain while you're doing it! The pattern is really good at telling you to stay stitch before you do anything else at all, but with such a slinky fabric and these huge skirt pieces, it was inevitable that everything would end up pulled out of place. Aligning the interfaced bits with the stretched out non interfaced ones was particularly challenging.

The slinkiness also won't have helped with the skirt length, which was just crazy long when I first sewed it together. I am pretty short, so a little bit of shortening is to be expected, but I ended up taking 15 cm off all around the hem, plus an extra 15 cm off the front part where the wrap pieces overlap, where presumably it got pulled out of shape despite the stay stitching. But at least chopping it was pretty straightforward.