Today I am sharing my take on the Petula Shirt by Republique du Chiffon, but you can see that I have diverted pretty far from the original here – hacking it into a full-length shirt dress.

I’m not going to talk too much about sewing the Petula Shirt pattern itself. I sewed this pattern a little while back and gave an extensive critique of the pattern.

It was one of those patterns where I love the end result but I found the pattern unnecessarily difficult to work with. You can read all about it at my original post on the Petula Shirt, if you’re interested.

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But, do you know what is more annoying than having to deal with a really frustrating pattern?

When you go searching through your collection of ‘already cut out’ patterns and realise you somehow got rid of this one accidentally.

Oh no!!!!!

And so you have to print it out again and deal with all the problems described in my first blog post all over again!!!!!

And the only reason that I was willing to deal with such pain, was that I had a very clear vision in my head of what I wanted to create. And the top half of the Petula Shirt pattern, really just gave me everything I wanted.

When Atelier Brunette released their latest collection of stripes on viscose, I was really pleased. I love the way that they look as though they are a nice crisp cotton, but they have increased drape and less crinkle-factor that comes from being a viscose modal blend.

The hardest part was deciding which stripe-width and which colour I wanted to buy…

So I really wanted to create a simple oversized striped shirt dress which would use a long and wide fabric belt to give it shape.

For my Petula Shirt ‘dress-version’, I simply extended the length of the Petula Shirt by 65 centimetres. Along the hemline, I tapered the pattern upwards at the side seam, to create a slight curved hem at the side seams.

I added side seam pockets and obviously the fabric belt.

I was inspired here by a very simple feature I noticed in a RTW dress recently. It left two slits in the side seam at the waist, through which a fabric belt could be inserted, but from the inside! So you place the belt against your back and then feed from the inside to the outside of the dress.

Once you’ve done this, you have a lot of flexibility to tie the belt around the outside in whatever various ways are most visually pleasing to you – each creating a different look. Although I didn’t manage to photograph more than one tie-style cuz I was tired and trying to take photos of 10 recent makes at once!

This was one of those projects where I had an idea in my mind and I managed to execute it just as I had imagined. It’s probably one of my proudest every pattern hacks.

So, yeah, I’m going to call this a sewing victory!

What are your happy hacking stories????