Butterick 6556 Dress Sewing Pattern Review

The Butterick 6556 dress has been on my radar of patterns I'd probably like to sew for some time now, so when it was included with issue 70 of Love Sewing magazine I took it as a sign that it was meant to be and snapped up a copy. I had some perfectly suited fabric in my stash, so it quickly hopped to the top of my sewing list!

Butterick 6556 is one of the Patterns by Gertie series, and so unsurprisingly has a bit of a vintage feel about it. The pattern is for a close-fitting dress with lined bodice, square front and back neckine, sleeveless or short sleeved options, a very full pleated skirt, pockets (yay for pockets!), and a centre back lapped zip.

While I have myriad patterns with a fitted bodice and full skirt, the square neckline on B6556 is something a bit different and really appealed to me.

Based on the finished garment measurements, I chose to make a size smaller than recommended for my measurements and cut a 14 at the shoulders/bust, blending out to a 16 at the waist. That worked out nicely and my toile fitted well - it was just a tad snug at the waist (fine when I was standing up but a little tight sitting down and considering that I would want to be able to eat when wearing the dress!). In my actual version I used a fractionally smaller seam allowance at the waist (probably about 1.2 instead of 1.5 cm), and that was enough to give me a bit of breathing space.

I also chose to sew the neckline with a 1 cm seam instead of 1.5 cm just to raise it ever so slightly and bring the shoulders in a touch. I'm gradually coming to the realisation that I probably have proportionately narrow shoulders, and that extra half centimetre on each side helps the shoulder straps to stay in place.

As you may have noticed, I also removed the cut-out/notch/whatever-you-want-to-call-it from the centre front neckline. This was possibly slight laziness on my part because I thought that it would take a bit of effort to get that looking crisp and perfectly symmetrical, and I didn't think it necessarily added much to the dress. I think I actually prefer the unadulterated square neckline.

I also lengthened the bodice by 2.5 cm as is standard for me. Another note on length - the skirt in the pattern is probably a bit longer than most. I often have to lengthen skirts by a couple of inches, but this is the skirt length straight out of the packet and it's bottom-of-the-knee length on me (I'm about 5'9").

The instructions were typical commercial pattern instructions - clear but brief. I did think it was a bit odd that they had you leave a gap at the shoulders when sewing the outer bodice to the lining. That's presumably to make turning the bodice/lining the right way out easier, but I managed to turn mine out perfectly well without leaving a gap and that meant that I then didn't have to hand sew the gap closed.

The fabric I used is one of the longer-term residents in my stash. It's a cotton shirting that I bought a couple of years ago, I'm fairly sure from Fabworks. It was the victim of my over-ambitious seasonal sewing plans and didn't get sewn up before the end of one summer, then got put away and has only just found its way to my sewing table. I think this pattern works quite well with the stripes. Obviously making sure they all matched up nicely took a little bit of time and patience, but I'm happy with how it turned out - especially across that centre back seam and lapped zip.

The only thing I'm not too crazy about is that the fabric creases and wrinkles as soon as you look at it, and it seemed to conspire with my camera to make the dress look a bit ill-fitting in places even though in real life it looks great. I can deal with a few creases though, and let's face it what it looks like in real life is more important than photos.

I'm really pleased with how this dress turned out. The ultimate sign that a project has been successful is when you immediately start dreaming up future versions of the pattern, and I've definitely got a few more Butterick 6556 dresses in my head already. They may not all come to fruition, but a second version is already waiting to be made using some beautiful Seasalt cotton voile - watch this space for that one!