This beauty is the Saraste Shirt Dress from Breaking the Pattern. Which, in case you’ve been living under a sewing machine cover, is maybe the best sewing book ever, from Named Clothing.

My Saraste Shirt Dress is sewn in simply divine “Temps” Nani Iro linen – I bought mine from Meter Meter.

You know, there is almost nothing I love more in sewing than playing around with Nani Iro textiles. I feel as though, whatever I may create with them, I can really take no credit for the end product. The textile itself speaks so clearly that I’m just doing a little window dressing on what was already a work of art in itself.

If a Nani Iro textile is a painting, turning it into a garment is framing it – providing a complementary lens through which it can be more readily viewed.

I felt like the Nani Iro print was the absolute star of the show in my Bondi Dress and my Kabuki tee. This Saraste Dress is just continuing that tradition.

Plus, I just can’t resist anything with border print potential!

Seriously, I promise I’m not usually an overly sentimental person. Fabric is fabric. But Nani Iro fabrics… I feel that they have a depth that I can barely even appreciate.

Plus, my Saraste Shirt Dress is photographed here after three consecutive days of wear. Linen.

Nani Iro prints can even make linen wrinkles looks beautiful…

My Saraste Shirt Dress

My Saraste Shirt Dress is a straight size 5.

Like my Utu Pinafore, also from the Breaking the Pattern book, I found the fit just spot on! It has just enough ease to be comfortable without feeling over-sized.

I’d also previously made a Saraste top and shirt hybrid, so I was pretty confident fitwise going into this make.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but prior to Breaking the Pattern, I always found Named Clothing a bit intimidating. Their models are always so, well, model-like. I wasn’t sure if I could make their patterns work on my body. But I have been amazed so far at how well their patterns fit me right out of the packet. I’m hoping to cut into the Anni Building Block Patterns soon to test out whether this is a continuous theme across their range.

Here’s hoping!

The only modifications I made for my Saraste Shirt Dress was to use the long sleeves from the Solina dress (minus the long wraps). I also replaced the gathered front with pleats because I was totally inspired by DP Studio’s le 607 – which is pretty much my perfect pleated shirt dress. I couldn’t really justify purchasing a new pattern, however, so I made do with this slight homage.

It was just too much effort to add pleats at the back though, so I just stuck with gathers there.

I also added in side-seam pockets.

Because pockets maketh the sewist.

And, since I’m getting highly technical here, I think I used two more buttons than recommended in the book…

Nani Iro SNAFU

There’s actually a major “whoops” in this Saraste Shirt Dress dress – is it visible?

(Wait don’t actually answer that – just realised that maybe you guys would answer with about a million other problems which I haven’t actually noticed yet…)

With this Nani Iro fabric, pattern placement is everything. So I was, obviously, cutting the fabric as a single layer.

The fabric comes with “stripes” of the three shades of blue in it. And the more royal blue shade that I used in the centre front only exists in a rather narrow strip. It was just wide enough to cut out my centre front pieces.

As I was carefully laying and planning I thought to myself: “imagine how bad it would be if I accidently forgot to flip my pattern piece over when cutting the second piece.”

And then, like ten minutes later, what do I do?

Totally forgot.

I ended up with two identical left centre front pieces. And ahhh, were they both perfectly cut – you better believe it!

There wasn’t enough left to cut a new piece in the blue so one side is actually cut in two and pieced together (the seam is around the bust line – in retrospect, not the ideal place for it!).

But, hey, we shall overcome.

It is just a dress, after all.

Albeit, quite a pretty one…

Oh and, finally, a little P.S! If you like to get your blog hits through Bloglovin’, feel free to follow me over there: you can find me here. And you can find me on Instagram here.