Hello Darlings!
As a sewist, I always lean towards making practical garments that I can wear on daily basis - if I'm putting time and effort to make something, I better be getting a lot of wear out of it! But sometimes... Sometimes I crave to make something exceptional and this dress is exactly that!
Shirring is one of my favourite sewing techniques - it's easy, quick and very comfortable to wear, truly a jackpot! Adding even a tiny bit of shirring can drastically change garment look and one of my most memorable uses of this technique was adding elastic waist into this blue Burda Style dress - just look how such a little detail alters entire feel and fit of the dress:
So in short - my fascination with shirring has been blooming for years now and it was time to put it into ultimate test - shirred dress.
There are lots of variations and tutorials for shirred dresses online - lots of flowy, long, gorgeous dresses that take only an hour or so to make. They are beautiful, but... they didn't feel like 'me'. So, I decided to make a shirred dress to fit my style and this is how this dress came to life.
For the fabric I decided to go with satin - while it's a rather unconventional choice, but satin looks BREATHTAKING when shirred. I seriously took way longer to make this dress than I should, simply because I kept pausing to admire the beauty shirred satin.
One thing that is great about shirring is that it adapts to figure flawlessly - thanks to all the elastic in this dress, it fits so snuggly around the figure and it doesn't even matter if my measurements changes throughout the years or not: this dress will ALWAYS fit.
I fell in love with this dress so much that I decided to turn it into a sewing pattern - while this look is very different from my other designs, I wanted to share this beauty with others. And this is how my sewing pattern for 'Sofia' dress came to life.
Why I named her 'Sofia'? I first made this dress from satin and playful luminosity of shirred satin reminded me of the old-school Hollywood glamour, so naming this beauty after one of the icons of golden cinema age seemed fitting.
From the technical details, this dress took around 5 hours to make - while the dress itself is easy, marking all shirring lines and then shirring does take it's time. I used around 2 meters of satin fabric and 2 thread cones of elastic gum thread (I use Mettler Elastic thread - while other threads work too, I find this particular thread to be best in sewing experience and stretch recovery).
If you would like to make this dress yourself, you can find my Sofia dress pattern here, and you can watch full sewing tutorial on my Youtube channel:
This dress does look stunning in real life and jaw-dropping beautiful in photos (especially for upcoming holiday season photoshoots), so I hope you will love this dress as much as I do!
Thank you for reading and I wish you a wonderful day ahead!
Julie