My Hackalong Make with Simplicity/McCalls and The Eve Appeal

Hi everyone! Long time no speak. I’ve been a little caught up for the last few months… dealing with a combination of moving house AND morning sickness! Yep, all good news to be expecting – and baby Walker no 2 is due in June. Exciting times! But safe to say that I definitely wouldn’t recommend moving house when struggling with morning sickness!

So I haven’t exactly had the luxury of time to be able to sew lately. Though, I have been having fun setting up my new sewing room in the new house (full photos to come soon in another blog post!). But just now been able to start dabbling in a bit of sewing in snippets of time here and there. So feels great to be showing you a new make!

This is a dress I have made as part of the ‘Hackalong’ run by Simplicity/McCalls, which is supporting the fantastic charity, The Eve Appeal. I’m so grateful to have been included in the blogger line-up for this! I’ve been admiring other bloggers makes for months.

The pattern I chose was the Simplicity 8658 top. I spent such a long time working out a style that would work around a little baby bump. And I figured that this would be large enough to work well. I didn’t want anything too fitted!

And the fabric I choose was this gorgeous John Kaldor crepe from Minerva (full disclosure – fabric was gifted to me in order to take part in this project). It was an absolute dream to work with – very well behaved, and so super drapey!

Anyway, back to the hack along! These are the alterations I made to the pattern, in order to magic a top into maternity dress:

-Lengthened to dress length

-Sizing graded out from the waist down

-Shirring added to high waist (above bump)

I’m so pleased with the result! AND I need to tell you that this was my first ever attempt at shirring. I was terrified of it all going wrong and ruining the whole project! But all was fine – after tonnes of practice on fabric scraps beforehand. I did have to change my bobbin tension so it was a little tighter – which gave lovely ruffles in the shirring. I did 5 lines of shirring over 2 inches (a line every half inch).

I hope you like what I’ve done with this pattern – it was a little bit scary at points, but so pleased I braved it!

If you want to follow along with the hack along, head on over to the Sew Direct website here –https://www.sewdirect.com/hack-along/

And you can find out more about the charity, The Eve Appeal here.

Thanks for reading!

Jen x