Ok, ok, I have not made this pattern 37 times, but I feel like I’ve made it a lot and the truth is that I have never been completely happy with it. My first version is here where I was given some beautiful fabric from Girl Charlee with which to sew it up. I loved the drape of the fabric, the bold print, the slinkiness, but…it just wasn’t me. I’m still not sure why. You ever see something that you can intellectually identify as aesthetically pleasing, but it’s just not for you? That was my relationship to this fabric. It might be the simple fact that I am not a huge fan of wearing black- had this fabric been yellow or pink, I’m sure it would be in rotation in my closet to this day. But alas, it sat idle in my closet for nearly 2 years without one wear before I decided to put it in my etsy shop for sale, and I donated the proceeds to charity. Subsequently a maker friend of mine, Sarah (who is the creator of the feel good/give good website youareanawesomehuman.com– go check it out and spread some love while helping support a small business!), bought the dress from my shop and gifted it to a friend of hers for Christmas who looked absolutely stunning in it (they sent me pics!), so I have no regrets about this make it at all. If there is such thing as a “rightful owner” of anything in this world, this dress found theirs!
The second time I made this dress was as a gift to my Mom, made up in a bright floral print, and she loved it so much that she wore it into the ground- not even sure it’s still standing anymore. Which means I should probably make her another one. I wish I had a picture of her in it- it fit her and her style so perfectly! Anyways, after seeing her flaunt her Kielo around, I became determined to make myself a more casual one that I could wear regularly (at this point, I was convinced that the reason I didn’t wear my original black and white version was because it was too dressy for everyday but not quite dressy enough for a red carpet event). Named Patterns wrote a blog post on how to add sleeves to the wrap dress and shorten it and I was obsessed with the pretty striped version they hacked. I decided that this was the dress that needed to be in my closet, so I bought some beautiful striped oatmeal-colored jersey from Organic Cotton Plus and went to town hacking the original pattern by following the blog post’s notes.
It was a catastrophe. My friend Lawrence said I looked like the girl from The Ring when I showed him a photo of myself wearing it, my head bowed in defeat. I don’t know what went wrong! Perhaps the fabric was too heavy for the pattern? Maybe I should have adjusted the sizing even more? Who knows! But it looked terrible. Misshapen, baggy, tired- no matter which way I tied the straps or tried to cinch the fabric, it was screaming “NO NO NO”. I wrote another post on trying to Make It Work by getting rid of the “wrap” factor and making a few other adjustments so that it was more fitted and I wasn’t swimming in so much heavy fabric, but I messed up the collar by cutting too much off the seam allowance and I ended up with a distorted hem that wanted to be a boatneck but ultimately looked like a shipwreck (<—–I have never been prouder of a sentence than that one right there). Although I bravely wore the dress once or twice, it just didn’t look or feel good on, and it has since been relegated to the Butthole Bin™. I’m pretty sure there is enough fabric left in this dress to salvage a tank top out of it so I’m hoping to get that done this summer cause I HAAAATE WASTING FABRIIIIIC.
So let’s fast forward to Make 37. I learned my lesson. Sort of. I had a few yards of fabric from The Fabric Store that I thought I was going to use for this pattern, but that pattern turned out to be such a disaster when I made it the first time that I knew I would never make it again, so I sat for a while pondering what else it could be made into. And then it hit me: the Kielo wrap dress would be perfect for it! The fabric is a translucent, smokey black rayon crepe with a gauzy texture, and its’ sheerness gives the same effect as the sample of the Kielo dress on Named’s website, which is actually the dress I fell in love with when I first saw the pattern. Why did I keep making this pattern up in printed stretchy knit prints when everything I loved about the pattern was exemplified in the simple, sheer fabric in the pattern photo? Why had I been going about this all wrong for so long??
The Kielo Wrap Dress states that you can use either a knit or a woven fabric, which has always stumped me a bit. I am usually surprised when two fabrics with such different qualities are suggested as being interchangeable for certain patterns, and now I know the truth- they AREN’T. Or maybe they are, but there is usually some adjusting necessary, which the Named pattern description doesn’t get into at all. When making the Kielo in knit fabrics in the past, it always seemed gigantic on me. The armholes were huge, the neckline was wider than I liked, and I end up cutting over a foot of length off the bottom of the dress- and this is in the smallest size!
When I made the dress in a woven fabric, I assumed the sizing would finally be just right, but it was actually smaller than I anticipated. The armholes were so tight that they felt uncomfortable when I put it on with a bra. Since I have to wear a slip underneath this dress I don’t mind not wearing a bra underneath (my boobs are small enough to go commando without sacrificing comfort) but this definitely could have used a bit more wiggle room in the armholes, and after I took these photos for the first time, I realized I needed to make some minor adjustments for it to reach its maximum potential.
OKAY FULL DISCLOSURE: I spent about 3 hours prepping my photo setup, putting on makeup, doing my hair, and taking photos of the 8-ish projects I had completed over the past several weeks, as per usual for my blog posts. I had a lot of fun styling the roller set I had given myself the day before and I was super excited to finally get some of these fun makes out to the world. The next morning I woke up bright and early to start processing all my photos on my computer and when I reached for the camera…nada. There was no memory card in it. You may think me an idiot, but I reviewed each photo I took before moving on to the next look and every single photo had been stored inside the camera’s “memory”. What I learned after some VERY AGGRESSIVE googling was that my camera’s default setting was in “demo mode”, meaning you can take lots of pictures (apparently over a hundred of them) without a memory card in the slot and the camera will “hold” them for a certain period of time. This setting is for customers at a store interested in purchasing the camera; they can take photos and review them as if it did have a memory card in it. So yeah. My photos were lost. If a camera takes 150 photos without a memory card in it, were the photos ever actually taken?
The whole point of this pitiful story is to say that when I first took these photos, I knew I wanted to make the armholes bigger, and I also decided to top stitch the edges of the sides of the dress where they wrap to the front- my floaty, gauze-like material kept billowing awkwardly at the seams and I figured that stitching the fabric down might help with that. So I was able to make those changes to the dress before the SECOND set of of blog photos I took the next morning, so what you see here shows the final version of the dress. The only other changes I made besides lengthening the armholes and topstitching the side seams was to use bias tape to hem the neckline. The instructions have you fold the hem under and stitch down, which I think is generally a very unprofessional and shoddy way to finish an armhole or a neckline. My biggest takeway from these adjustments, and something I can probably apply to all future patterns that suggest wovens and knits for the same design, is to be prepared to go up a size when using a woven and down a size when using a knit. Or better yet, just make a damn muslin. That seems to be the answer to 80% of my sewing problems.
Construction wise, there isn’t really anything new to add to this pattern that I didn’t touch on in my first blog post about it. It’s a very quick dress to put together, and aside from needing to have gone up one size for the woven fabric, I am happy with how it came out. If I had known how tight the armholes would be, I would have added a little width to the bust of the pattern pieces, but unfortunately the dress was already made up by the time I realized this issue. The only fix was to widen the armholes on the sides and bottom, and as such, more of the slip I am wearing underneath peeks through than I would prefer. But it’s a small issue and I don’t think it completely detracts from the dress- this is still far and away better than the last version I made of it! I always need to fiddle with the side seams on the wrap of this dress so that it will lay right, but my topstitching really did the trick (and probably would have worked well on the past versions I made of this). I absolutely love the way the sheer fabric looks with a black slip underneath- it feels sexy and looks chic, and, to me, more visually interesting than just a regular black dress (to date this is the only all-black garment I have in my closet).
I’m not quite sold on Named patterns yet. I absolutely love the designs and styling, and I have seen some awesome makes based off of their patterns (What Katie Sews has done some stellar work with their designs), but I feel like their construction methods are super simple and the finished projects need extra elements to look polished. I have successfully made this pattern work with the bias binding, but I worry that their other patterns might require a bit of extra attention to elevate their looks, too. I really haven’t made enough of their patterns to have formulated this opinion though- the only other pattern I have made of theirs is the Inari Tee Dress, which looked like a disaster on me the first time I made it and is just not a silhouette suited for my bottom-heavy shape. But I also revisited this pattern recently, and I am happier with it now after some small but impactful adjustments to the shape- you will be seeing that project on the blog shortly!
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