TL;DR – I hacked another pattern and I might never go back to the old way of sewing this dress.

I’ve made the (free) Mary Quant mini-dress twice, with mixed results. It seems to do better with structured wovens, rather than more drapey ones. I also still can’t properly sew a zipper. And I was lazy and didn’t feel like doing a facing. So I made the neckline a little bigger and decided to finish all the edges with bias tape.

The fabric itself used to be a shower curtain. A Marimekko for Crate and Barrel shower curtain to be precise that I rescued off of eBay (I think). Merimekko fabric is EXPENSIVE. Merimekko shower curtains are expensive for shower curtains, but a steal for 100% cotton fabric. I even used a piece of the upper-border, reinforced for hanging in your bathroom, as the back accent piece.

I also decided to go with the rounded pockets this time, and I am thrilled to inform you all that I finally managed to figure out how to do a stitch that I can then use to make a gather, which will be really helpful, since my next handful of patterns lean all the way into the current peasant dress trend and thus I need to GATHER to get them to look right. So that was nice to learn.

I think it looks AMAZING. I really wanted to make a dress that would let the leaf pattern shine, which this one definitely does. I prefer it without the facing, as it takes away some of the weight, and doesn’t the bias tape finish look adorable?

The color and the pattern and the finishing just SCREAMS spring, don’t you think?