Chambray Dress

A year or so ago I saw a woman wearing a denim dress and found myself fancying a garment like that. It was essentially a shirt dress made with chambray, and I had some of that from a destash sale. I went looking for patterns and settled on Simplicity 8014, which had been voted best pattern of the year on a sewing pattern review site.

Having made the mistake of buying a pattern in US sizes that were too small for me, I took care to check the eBay seller’s information carefully and there was no indication it was in US sizings. So of course, only when it turned up was it possible to see it was was. I had to buy it again, and by the time it arrived I’d moved on to other projects so this one got put aside.

Recently I got around to making it.

I have to admit, I wondered how the pattern managed to be voted Best of the Year. The version I happened to want to make involved so many switches back and forth in the instructions that I eventually had to scan and print it so I could cut them up and put them in the right order. Even then, I had to tweak the order on the fly as well because I was top stitching in another colour and didn’t want to be changing the thread constantly.

Then there were some oddities with the collar instruction. The only time the seam allowance is mentioned on the pattern pieces but not on the instruction sheets is for the collar. The collar is the last part to be sewn, and the instructions are incomplete and in one place don’t match up with the diagram. Also, there is no mention of overlocking edges to prevent fraying, and the number of buttons for the view I did was two short of what was needed.

It seems like the manufacturer has decided to truncate the instructions so they took up less pages, and whoever got that job really didn’t care how they got it to fit.