A shirred summer dress

Hello everybody! I hope you have had a good Summer with a lot of sun and fun. I certainly did and although my intention was to sew very little, I actually ended up creating a bit of a Summer wardrobe at the beginning of July and thought I share this with you now even though Summer is drawing to a close.

I made three items and will post about these over the coming weeks.

In June 2013 I bought this set of Anna-Maria Horner 'Field Study' when I was holidaying in New York.

These are gorgeous cotton/linen blends that lend themselves ideally to dresses, tops and skirts. All I knew when I bought it was to make a 'Study Hall skirt' but I had no definite plans for the rest. So inspiration struck at last and I had used up this fabric in no time.

I love shirred summer dresses, they are flattering and easy to wear and if you are not too busty, you get away wearing them without a bra. They are my go-to summer dresses for at home and when I holiday in the Caribbean in the winter. The one dress I have been wearing for the past 5 years or so is finally losing shape. It was store bought and was great but the shirring is slackening and overall it's a bit tired now.

So I took out the wonderfully named 'Parenthetical in Deep' from my stash and set out making a new summer dress.

I used this tutorial for the dress which is fantastic. Shirred dresses are basically two big rectangular pieces stitched together with some straps. Shape comes through the shirring and this dress came together in less than 2 hours.

I love the way the pattern is squished together through the shirring and so much liked it that I made also a shirred top but more of that in another post.