Sewing Adventures – Papercut Patterns Sway dress

I had thought I’d set myself an extra challenge this year and make all my patterns myself, so no shop bought patterns no Indies all my own…..then I realised sometimes you just need clothes and you need to get on with things and just to go for it.

Enter the Papercut Patterns Sway dress. This pattern was given to me by a friend after the fire, they thought having a loose swingy dress would be an easy make after all our dramas. They were right it, was a quick make.

I think the longest part was cutting out and making sure the rayon fabric didn’t slip and slide around. I cut on the wooden floor and it was a surprisingly stable rayon which made for a nice change.

I cut the size medium but increased the length as I’m hoping it might be a good trans seasonal piece and I’ve been liking the look of longer dresses lately so I can see how I look and feel wearing one.

Having read reviews of the pattern I should have been more cautious and checked the armholes but I didn’t. They are really big, like show about an inch of the side of my bra big. I don’t care about showing my bra but I do care about ugly armholes and the size of these is not good. Am not going to hassle with this make now but in future would be adding to the armholes to bring them up by at least 4 to 5 cm.

Becasue I wanted to keep the rayon to be nice and flowing I chose to go with the provided facings, despite my hatred of facings. They go in easily and make the insides look clean but this bit here where you can see the facing from the lower v neck is visually repugnant to me. Next time I’ll use bias binding to finish the neck and armholes and avoid this.

The waist ties are not too long, I choose to make my longer so the ends would fall down the dress more. Mostly because my middle section needs a bit of visual camouflage. I added the tassels to the end to stop a fairly plain dress (for me) be not too boring. Because the waist ties are not attached to the dress it means they won’t be going through the wash which is handy as I’m fairly sure those are ceramic beads of some kind?

Pattern: Sway Dress by Papercut Patterns cut in a size Medium

Fabric: Printed rayon from the stash but originally from Pitt Trading, cream tassels purchased from Pitt Trading

Alterations: Added 10cm length to the dress, cut waist tie twice as long, added tassels. Next time use Bias binding instead of facings, add 4 to 5cm height to underarms to bring them up.