During May for The Monthly Stitch, the focus was on knits. I suppose the t-shirts I made for Romeo would have counted, but what I really wanted to make was a copy-cat version of the “Coach Tour Dress” from ModCloth.
I’ve never run across a pattern for a dress exactly like this one, so I combined some patterns with some self-drafting and came up with something pretty close to my inspiration dress.
The most distinctive feature of this dress is the asymmetric collar. I used McCall’s 6796 for the top of the bodice.
The sleeves were part of the McCall’s pattern, though the inspiration dress doesn’t have them. I was hoping for a multi-season dress, so sleeves seemed like a good idea. The waistband and tabs I drafted on my own. The skirt is the Kitschy Coo Lady Skater dress skirt. I slashed and spread the pattern at the waist line it to give it gathers and put a little length on it. The side-seam pockets in the skirt are from the Tiramisu pattern.
The fabric is out of my stash. It’s a cotton/lycra jersey, but not just a jersey, more of a double-knit. I had bought it online thinking it would be a lovely color for a Pavlova top, and it would be, but since it turned out to be a much heftier weight then I was expecting, I decided a wrap top would be too bulky. It’s the perfect dress-weight knit, so I wish I could find more, but like many things bought online with sketchy descriptions, this was a one-in-a-million kind of find.
Hmm. Maybe not the most “flattering” in the conventional sense, but very comfortable, and unlikely to give me a wardrobe malfunction with the high neckline and mid-length skirt. It’s a little too heavy to be a good summer dress, but I think through the rest of the year this will get worn a lot.
Flattering or not, I’m fairly certain that my version fits me better than one of the RTW ones that inspired me would have. If you’ve made a Red Velvet dress or followed along during the sew-along for it, you might have caught the phrase “deep bust adjustment“. A lot of RTW might fit me circumference-wise, but not necessarily length-wise in the bodice, so that empire waisted seamlines often end up crossing my bust-line rather than sitting under it. Since this dress was a mish-mash of patterns, there wasn’t technically a deep bust adjustment, but the same fitting principle still applied. I don’t think the original Coach Tour dress was meant to have an empire waist-line, but I think on me it would have ended up with one.
Stash-busting stats: 32/50 projects. 59 1/2 yards.
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