An Indoor Jungle Shirt Dress

Hello lovelies. So a little bit of a delay with this, my latest make (soz!). And before I get started, I just want to jump straight in and declare my love for this dress!

It was somewhat rushed through the sewing room – out of a mixture of leaving it last-minute, and sheer excitement. Excitement, because this was to be my outfit to wear to BLOGTACULAR!

For those who don’t know, Blogtacular is a most spectacular and inspiring conference for creative bloggers. I had an absolute blast of a day – and this dress was so fun to wear. I was so happy inside that I got so many compliments on it! Oh, and I had the pleasure of properly meeting the fabulous girlies from The Foldline, Kate and Rachel – nice to meet you ladies!

Anyway, back to the dress…

I picked up the fabric from CallyCo in Cambridge. Originally I had planned to use it to make a wedding guest dress at the start of June, but ended up running out of time for that. Hey ho… you know how it goes!

I was so instantly drawn to this fabric in the shop – mostly because I appear to have developed a slight obsession with indoor plants lately. As you can see, I have plenty of plants on my scaffold shelves in the kitchen – and I even have a little living wall in my house too! The pattern is of Monstera leaves – in fact this is one plant that I don’t have yet, but desperately wanting one for my living room. So for now, I have settled for the print on this lovely cotton fabric.

The pattern is a cutesy Pauline Alice Cami dress. I previously made one of these and have pretty much lived in it since! I knew that making another one gave me an opportunity to improve on the fit. The first one I made was somewhat tight around the old boobies, which is never that attractive for a buttoned-up shirt finish. I mean, it wasn’t too bad, but I decided to give myself a little bit more ease around the chest, so to take a little bit of strain from some of the buttons! I looked at doing a FBA, but I really don’t term myself as needing so much as that. So I just graded out the pattern piece so that it went from size 8 at the waist (which I knew was perfect), to size 10 around the chest. This seemed to do the trick, and I’m happy with the new fit.

I love everything about this dress pattern – the shirt styling combined with a girly gathered skirt, plus POCKETS! Yippeee!

So off I trotted in my ‘hot of the sewing machine’ Cami dress to London for my magical day at Blogtacular. It was all kinds of special.

Pattern: Pauline Alice Cami

Size made: 8 (waist down), 10 (chest)

Fabric: CallyCo, Cambridge

Buttons: Textile Garden