Butterick B6446 Wrap Dress

I made another dress from souvenir fabric bought during my trip to  Raleigh/NC. I bought the fabric at Joann Fabrics in Raleigh together with the flannel fabric I made a Belladone dress from. There are lots of peonies in different shades of pink printed on it. And I think it was not meant to be a fashion fabric but patchwork fabric. The cotton is medium weight and the fabric was 110 cm wide. As far as I remember it was on sale. Nevertheless I only bought 2 yards, because I had limited space in my suitcase.The length and width restrictions made it a little harder to find a suitable dress pattern. I knew I wanted to make a summer dress from this fabric. Luckily I also ordered some Butterick patterns on sale that Marvin brought with him when he came back home. I took the chance and ordered the fake wrap dress pattern B6446 that I had seen on Dolly Clackett and had my eyes on since then.

For my Butterick size, which is size 8, you only need 2 3/8 yards of fabric. Feasible I thought and gave it a try! Of course I had to omit the sleeves and I didn’t lengthen the skirt and cut View A, which has the shortest skirt version. And even though I had to mind the direction of the print I managed to cut the whole dress from my 2 yards of fabric. I even managed to cut the in-seam pockets from the fabric. The flowers on the pocket pieces are upside down however.

And speaking of pockets. I really like that the top of the pockets is sewn into the waist seam. That qay the pockets stay where they are supposed to be :) However they tend to gape a little as you might notice in the pictures.

I made a muslin before cutting into the nice fabric. Especially to see if my lengthening of the bodice had worked out. The pattern has no lengthening/shortening lines for the bodice, which is often the case when a bodice is hard to lengthen. I lengthened parallel to the wait seam. By 1 cm above the first pleat, by 1 cm between the two pleats and by 2 cm underneath the pleats. The pattern features two different bodice fronts, one that overlaps and has pleats and the other one (that underlaps if you so will ;)) that features common bust darts and is also used for both lining fronts.

The muslin showed that the lengthening worked out fine, I only had to lower the arm scye a little.

The patterns tells you to line the bodice, there are no pattern pieces for facings. And so I lined the bodice completely. I used some very light cotton lawn and I hope it won’t add any extra warmth.

The pattern describes really well how you have to assemble the bodice shell and lining to get a neat finish of the neckline and arm holes. However as this is a wrap dress, you cannot hide the seam allowance of the waist seam between the two layers, so I overlocked that seam. That makes it impossible to warps the invisible zipper between shell and lining and so I decided to overlock the center back seam allowances  as well. To make up for this I french seamed the side seams and hemmed the skirt with some invisible hand stitches.

Something worth noting concerning this pattern might be that size 8 is not the size I would have picked from looking at the measurement charts, according to those charts I would at least need to sew a size 10. Plus another very important thing to me concerning the patter is, that 5/8″ seam allowances are included in the pattern and the instructions are very thorough.

So, this was the last fabric I bought in America that was still in my stash. But don’t worry I still have 2 or 3 patterns left to try :)

Macht’s gut!

Katharina