Today I am sharing my, roughly, one millionth Deer and Doe Myosotis Dress!

But this one has a twist.

One I cannot believe that I haven’t thought of earlier.

I’ve hacked the bodice to remove the darts and instead create the bust and waist shaping with princess seams.

And, what can I say, MIND BLOWN!

I love a princess seam bodice. I have distinct memories of being 17 years old and trying on my Aunt’s graduation dress (it was hand made by my Nana and featured these gorgeous appliqué roses snaking down the bodice down to the skirt). I wanted to wear the gorgeous dress to wear for my upcoming high school graduation. And I remember my seamstress Nana commenting on how well princess seams suited me.

I don’t think I even knew what princess seams were at the time, but the comment stayed with me!

And once I started sewing, I gravitated towards princess seams.

However, in my experience in the indie pattern world, princess seams can more often be found with very “party dress”. While there are plenty of options for more formal and structured designs, the most common form of shaping for more casual bodices (where such shaping is wanted/needed in the first place), definitely seems to be darts.

Well, maybe I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but I had no idea how absolutely easy it is replace darts with princess seams and now I can’t help but think that this might become a bit of a go-to move for me.

At minimum, I think I will never make the Deer and Doe Myosotis without this princess seamed bodice again!

A million Myosotis Dresses

I’ve blogged about the Deer and Doe Myosotis plenty of times before, like here and here and here and here and here.

Fuck, I like this pattern!

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So I’m just going to cover the basics here, and then focus most of this post on what this Myosotis Dress different – namely, the princess seam hack.

So this is a size 40, but I added a cm or so to the side seam at the waist when cutting. I have used the statement view A sleeve. My skirt is longer than the pattern as designed – consisting of the very technical measurement of “as long as my available fabric allowed”.

Luckily, I’m very happy with the midi-esque length it is hitting at.

Princess seam hack to the Myosotis Dress

So let’s get to the princess stuff!

The inspiration here was that I wanted to play with the stripes, so I wanted a princess seam bodice shirt dress to give me the opportunity to do so. While I found a few: the Cashmerette Lennox Shirt Dress and the Megan Nielsen Matilda, none of them gave off the vibe that I wanted.

What I really wanted was my go-to Myosotis Dress, but with an extra seam so I could contrast some stripes.

So I decided to see just how hard it was to convert darts to princess seams.

And was thrilled to discover that it is actually a piece of cake!!!

Seriously, I don’t know why I haven’t been doing it for years.

I’m not really a “how to” blog, but the process involves identifying the dart apex (formed by the intersection of the waist and bust darts), and using this as a reference point for drawing a curve from the shoulder or armhole to the edge of the waist dart. You then cut or fold out the darts. I looked at this Craftsy tutorial to learn how to do it.

I actually found less information about how to convert to princess seams when you darted bodice only has one set of dart: the back of the Deer and Doe Myosotis Dress bodice only has darts at the waist. For this, I treated the apex point of the waist dart as the “dart point” and followed the same technique from the above-linked tutorial.

As I wasn’t really sure if it would work, I just gave it a go and then quickly muslined the bodice. Very happily, it seemed to have worked!

It sound a bit silly, but for me, learning after all these years that I can very easily transform the type of shaping included in a pattern feels a bit like a revolution.

I quite often look at a design and think “lovely, but if only it had princess seams”. Now, I feel like the world has opened for me.

Just think of all the stripe play potential!!

Speaking of stripes, I wanted to give a shout out to this yarn dyed striped linen, which was just gorgeous. In fact, as soon as this fabric arrived in the mail, I ordered more because it just has the perfect texture and weight and I love the idea of a future Olya Shirt out of it.

This fabric came from a new-to-me fabric source, the French RTW brand Zyga which specialises in linen and sells 3 metres coupons of their leftover fabric for fantastic prices!

So, basically, I have newly discovered that I can transform just about anything to princess seams and I have a cheap new source of truly gorgeous linen…

Sounds dangerous, right…..