If there’s one thing I am in constant need of in my wardrobe, it’s long-sleeved shirts. T-shirts, blouses, sweatshirts, what have you – any category you could describe, I assure you, I don’t have enough of them. Part of this is simply that I don’t go clothes shopping super often anymore (“I could make that!”, blithely forgetting to ask whether I will have time to make that…), but it is also because long sleeves are notoriously difficult for me to find in RTW. As stated at the top of the blog, I’m a tall gal, and at 5’11” my arms are proportional to my body and my shoulders are decently broad. This leads to a loooooot of chilly wrists. And nobody likes chilly wrists!
Okay, my wrists may still be slightly chilly – but it’s an improvement!
So when Seamwork’s November issue dropped, I was very excited. Know what else I am in need of in my wardrobe? Henley tops! I love the interest a placket gives to an otherwise simple t-shirt, and the relaxed fit has always been a favorite of mine – so the Elli Henley was like an answer to a prayer I didn’t know I’d prayed. I used one of my points to snap up the pattern straight away, and then on further perusal of the issue I ran across their tutorial to hack the Elli into a casual knit dress. Ka-ching! Compared to my collection of long-sleeved and winter-appropriate dresses, my collection of long-sleeved shirts seems positively bountiful, so I knew that while I definitely needed to crank out a handful of shirts, I also had to try at least one dress.
Luckily, I’d found the most delicious ponte on one of my periodic dives into Chic Fabric‘s bargain bin – definitely poly, but soft and beefy with a very cool burnout texture that contrasted matte and satiny patches over the fabric’s surface. I’d been seduced by the heft and the large-scale pink floral print, and while I didn’t know what I was going to make with it when I bought it, it immediately flew into my head when I thought of the Elli dress. So far, so good! I printed out the pattern, pieced everything together, then traced off a size 14 and followed the tutorial to lengthen the front and back to midi dress length, adding 1″ of length at the bust so the waist hit me in the right spot (#longtorsoprobs) and 22 1/2″ total to the bottom, also marking for a 14″ slit on each side. I roughly laid things out on my fabric to make sure I would have enough, started cutting, and then – I stopped. The holidays were creeping up, I was supposed to be working on presents, and my selfish sewing got pushed to the side. It wasn’t until after Christmas that I was able to finish cutting out all my pieces and start putting Elli together.
See here: me, when I finally got to return to my personal sewing after the holidays!
Putting together the dress was simple enough – I used my regular machine set to a narrow zig-zag for all the seams, and a straight stitch on a slightly longer stitch length than I would usually use for the placket. My fabric was thicker and slightly less stretchy than what the pattern was designed for, so I had to get a little physical wrestling all the layers of the placket under my presser foot, and the banded neckline could have been maybe half an inch longer to make up for the lack of stretch (there’s a little bit of puckering), but overall things came together quickly and easily. In the course of a single late-night sewing session, I had a dress, and I was quick to slip it over my head and see how it fit.
It was… not great. I didn’t take pictures but trust me when I say I thought I looked like I was wearing a tube sock. The Elli is designed to have none to negative ease in the bust and hips, with slightly more ease through the waist, and is somewhat loose-fitting through the shoulders. Add to this that I have a sway back that I almost never make adjustments for (oops) and my ponte was much more structured than the pattern was drafted for, and you get a mess of pull lines, pooling fabric, and a less-than-flattering dress. I was bummed, and Elli got put in time-out for a little bit while I chewed over what I could do to salvage her. I loved the fabric, and I still wasn’t willing to let go of the dress I had in my head. Days later, I put the dress on again, and found that while I still wasn’t completely happy with the fit, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I remembered, and I jumped back in with some safety pins and a new zeal.
In the end, I only made a couple adjustments: I straightened out the hip curves to reduce excess fabric, and put two fish-eye darts into the lower back to take in the fabric that was pooling there. I did consider trying to fit the sleeve cap more closely to my shoulder, but in the end decided I wasn’t looking for a bodycon dress that hugged my every curve. The ease of a henley is what I was after, after all! This also let me accept the minimal drag lines and folds around the bust – short of adding even more darts into what was supposed to be an easy knit dress, I would never be able to eliminate them all, so I took them as part of the henley dress package and moved the hell on. About half an hour to hem the side slits, bottom, and sleeves, and I was finished!
I’m thrilled with this dress now. Not even 24 hours on from finishing it, I’ve been wearing it for the majority of the hours I’ve been awake since then, and it’s everything I wanted in a winter dress. Could I have made the sleeves just an inch longer? Sure! Do the ends of the fisheye darts bubble just a little bit on my ass, and not respond to pressing Yeah! Are the sleeves just a hair tighter than is ideal? Maybe! Is the fabric slightly sheer so you get a decent impression of whatever underwear (or fleece tights) I’m wearing underneath? Yup! But it’s warm, it’s comfortable as hell, and I was able to work through my fit issues to end up with an infinitely wearable dress. Plus, it’s covered in enormous flowers! With the sub-zero windchill that has descended upon NYC in the last 48 hours, I am loving how springy this dress makes me feel, while still knowing I’ll be snug and warm inside its long-sleeved embrace. To be sure, I’ll be choosing a much stretchier and/or drapier fabric for the many Elli shirts I plan on making soon, but for my first time making a pattern – and without making a muslin – I’d call this a rousing success.
Bubble butt! And not in the good way… but not too bad!
Is something on my shoe??
Trying for a sexy librarian vibe here I think?
On a different note, part of the reason I know how cozy this dress is, is because I wore it out into the cold last night after finishing it! Friends and I had purchased tickets before temperatures fell for the one-day in-theaters showing of They Shall Not Grow Old, Peter Jackson’s collaboration with the Imperial War Museum in honor of the centenary of the end of WWI. Had the tickets been for any other movie I would have cancelled, but yesterday was literally the only day it was being shown in theaters in NYC, so I gamely bundled up and braved the cold and I am so glad I did! If you have any interest at all in history, or human beings, you should see this movie. Almost the entirety of the film is archival footage from WWI, carefully restored and much of it also colorized, and the audio commentary is entirely taken from BBC audio interviews with veterans recorded in the 60s and 70s. The result is a movie that looks like it could have been shot a decade or so ago, not over 100 years – the quality of the images is obviously nowhere near today’s HD, but the frame rate of the playback has been matched as closely as possible to the frame rate the footage was shot at, over-exposed film or film blackened by age has been digitally enhanced so you can see every detail, and suddenly these men are real people again up onscreen. Coupled with the voices of these same men, decades later, reminiscing about what the war meant for them and how they lived as soldiers, it’s an incredibly powerful experience and one that I’d highly recommend. There are some graphic moments – trench foot and gangrene could have done without the enhancement, in my opinion – but Peter Jackson has stated that his aim was to create a documentary of the war as it was lived by the average British soldier, and I think he did a splendid job. The part that got me the most was probably the long litany of men at the very beginning, telling how young they were when they enlisted and how easy it was to lie about their age – boys of 14 and 15 were told to “go outside and have a birthday and come back” if they came in to enlist and didn’t think to lie about their age first thing. It’s easy to treat history as a far-off, dusty thing, but World War I was something that happened, in real time, to real people, and given that we live in what we know even now will be historic times someday, I think it’s both important and comforting to remember that.
The Elli Henley Dress If there's one thing I am in constant need of in my wardrobe, it's long-sleeved shirts. T-shirts, blouses, sweatshirts, what have you - any category you could describe, I assure you, I don't have enough of them.
