Simplicity’s Star Sewist Competition: My Nautical 6145

Several months ago I spotted a Boutique by Jaegar dress on ASOS and saved it to my wishlist immediately. It was stripy – check. It had a nautical rope detail – check. It was £99 – come again?! Once you become a dressmaker you often find yourself looking at clothes, tutting at the price/quality/fabric and thinking ‘I can do that’ – and so, I did!

For my entry to Simplicity’s Star Sewist competition I chose to make my own version of the stripy ASOS dress, using the New Look 6145 shift dress pattern provided for the contest. The pattern reminds me a little of the Tilly and the Buttons Coco, in that you can choose to add a collar and/or sleeves, although it’s a lot more roomy than the Coco and has a zip down the back – definitely more of a shift dress than a fitted dress.

The pattern itself is easy to make – for view B (the one I picked) there’s a front piece with darts, two back pieces with vertical darts, two sleeves and an invisible zip. No problems there! I used some black and white striped jersey from Minerva Crafts to make my dress as I wanted to emulate the one that I’d seen on ASOS – if you plan to do the same note that this fabric does carry quite a bit of weight and, due to the stretch, this makes it quite a difficult fabric to fit. I had to do a fair bit of tweaking to the size of my pattern pieces in order for the dress not to gape so much round the sides. Lesson learnt!

The best bit about this dress though has got to be my rope detailing across the front – doesn’t it look effective? ‘The dress’ on ASOS has two rows of squiggly rope but I chose to just do the one. And that was absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I ran out of rope. Nope, definitely not. You can find the polyester cord I used on the Minerva Crafts site here – it’s a bargain at 39p a metre, perhaps I should’ve bought a bit more!

How do you like my finished dress? Here’s hoping it’s good enough to earn a round of applause from the judging panel in the Simplicity Star Sewist competition (hello Lauren, Claire-Louise, Rachel and Wendy if you’re reading!) Has anyone else entered the competition? And did you choose to make the dress, the top, or the skirt? Send me your links!

PS – hope you enjoyed my pics this week!