McCalls 7948 Dress Sewing Pattern Review

I enjoy taking part in sewing challenges, so when Sarah, Suzy and Monika announced that this year's theme for #SewTogetherForSummer was sundresses, I decided that I needed to fit an appropriate pattern into my sewing plans. Having just bought McCalls 7948, that seemed to be an ideal candidate.

McCalls 7948, also known as #GraceMcCalls, features four dress options - each with a loose fitting bodice that has a back opening with thread loop and button, as well as various sleeve options and a sleeveless version. There are two different skirt options - either a pleated skirt with side pockets, or a gathered tiered skirt. I went for view C - the sleeveless bodice with gathered tiered skirt.

The instructions are fairly typical of commercial patterns. They're brief but clear if you have a bit of sewing experience, but might not be the most helpful if you're a complete beginner. 

The pattern is rated as Easy, which is probably fair as the looser style makes fitting a bit easier, and there aren't any darts or zips/buttonholes - the only fastening is the thread loop/button at the back neckline. 

One thing I would point out is to be careful when sewing the back facing - the seam allowances at the bottom of the slash are teeny tiny and after one wear my stitching in that area already needs a bit of repair.

I made a couple of changes to the pattern to suit my tastes. The most noticeable is probably that I added waist ties into the side seams. While boxy dresses are great in theory, I know that I like them a lot better in practice if the comfort of the loose style is combined with the option for a bit of added waist shaping. I used the waist tie pieces from the Asteria dress pattern, but in case it helps anyone else my finished ties are roughly 3.5 cm wide and each roughly 75 cm long.

My next alteration was to the armholes. There's no separate bodice/armhole cutting line for the sleeveless bodice - you just cut the same bodice as for the sleeved options and then bind the armholes rather than adding sleeves. In this case, I thought that doing that made the shoulders look too wide on me so I removed a wedge from the armscye. I ended up taking off about 3 cm at the shoulders and redrew the curve from there on both the front and back so it joined the original line at the underarm.

The third change I made was to the fabric cutting rather than the shape of the finished dress. The pattern has you cut the bottom tier of the gathered skirt in three pieces. I think this is possibly so it can be squeezed onto narrow fabric, but I had wide fabric with a large print that I didn't want to break up too much so I cut the bottom tier in two pieces. This means that I didn't end up with seams part way round the front of the dress. It's easy to do this - just measure the width of the skirt tier piece, multiply that by three and divide the result by two to get the width that you need.

When it comes to sizing, as with many commercial patterns, there's a lot of ease built into this pattern. Yes, this is meant to be a loose style but if you follow the recommended sizing it would end up VERY loose. I always pay more attention to the finished garment measurements (on the pattern paper), and based on those I made a straight size 14. That's one size down from what is recommended for my bust measurement and two sizes down from my waist/hip, and it's still plenty loose enough for my taste. 

I also lengthened the bodice by 1.5", which is very standard for me. 

While I really like the shape and style of this dress, the real star of the show is the fabric that I used. It's a cotton from Fabrics Galore (sadly it's no longer in stock) and I couldn't resist it when I saw it. It's a slightly odd fabric in some ways - there's a bit of stiffness and almost a waxy feel to it and I had to fight with it to get it to gather nicely (which made sewing those skirt tiers a little frustrating!), but you can forgive those things for a print this good I think. Even my dad commented that it was very jolly, and usually his standard comment about anything I make is 'it's alright'!

I really love how my M7948 dress turned out - all those colours and the volume in the skirt make it really fun to wear and I feel good in it, probably because I took the time to make changes to make it really "me". I'm glad that #SewTogetherForSummer pushed me to make it now, and I'm already thinking of ideas for using some of the other versions of the pattern. Have you sewn any of the views of this pattern?

Cocktail (Shirt) Dress - #sewtogetherforsummer

When I made my first Vintage Shirt Dress nearly two years ago, shortly after Sew Over It had released the pattern, I ended my blog post by asking what fabric I should use to make version number two. Well, it's taken me a while to get round to it, but now I can answer that question - better late than never hey?!

The fabric in question is a fun cotton poplin print which features multi-coloured cocktails, interspersed with little hearts and stars. It came from Backstitch, but I picked it up back in the January sales so unsurprisingly it doesn't seem to be available any more. When I bought it, I did have in the back of my mind that it might become my second Vintage Shirt Dress, but I put it away until the weather was slightly more suitable for a sleeveless dress.

I was given the incentive that I needed to dig the fabric out of the stash and get sewing by the #sewtogetherforsummer challenge that's being hosted by Sarah, Monika, and Suzy on Instagram. It's a very simple challenge - just sew any shirt dress that takes your fancy and post a photo on Instagram before 21 June to be in with a chance of winning some lovely prizes! And if you're pondering sewing a shirt dress but aren't sure of what pattern to use, browsing through the beautiful dresses already posted using the challenge hashtag will give you lots of inspiration.

I was really happy with how my first Vintage Shirt Dress turned out, so I kept things pretty much the same for this version, cutting a size 14, but with 2 inches added to both the bodice and the skirt. Like last time, I again had to take a bit of width out of the side seams at the underarms - I really should make that adjustment on the pattern pieces.

The only thing I did slightly differently was to use a couple of extra buttons. If I had any complaints about my apple print version, it would be that the neckline sometimes gapes open a bit more than is ideal. It's not so bad that I've felt the need to go back and alter it, and I still happily wear it, but it's noticeable enough that I made a mental note to add another button higher up when I sewed the pattern again. It's only slightly visible in most of these photos, but my top button is right at the bottom of the lapel - when I'm wearing it, it's actually mostly hidden by the lapel.

The buttons I used are some fairly basic plain bluey green ones that are a perfect match for one of the colours in the print. I had an ambitious idea that I'd somehow manage to find a range of plain buttons which were available in all the four main colours of the cocktails on the fabric, but sadly that wasn't to be. The shop where I bought these bluey green ones also had some perfect red ones in the same range, but just the green and red together had a slightly Christmassy appearance which wasn't really what I was after. So I let go of the multi-coloured buttons vision, but I'm not at all disappointed - the greeny buttons look great!

I'm very glad that I finally got around to making a second Vintage Shirt Dress, and I think I might possibly like this one even more than my first one. This summer could become my own little season of shirt dresses because I have ideas for a couple of others that I've been mulling over - Vogue 8577 or another Pauline Alice Cami dress are currently top of the list. Have you got any other favourite shirt dress patterns to recommend to me? Are you joining in with #sewtogetherforsummer?