My Quest for a Wrap Dress

I like wrap dresses a lot, I really do, they are a girl's best friend, they look good on any silhouette, they cover a little pizza-belly if needed and they just make everybody look slimmer. All I want is to be able to sew some. However, anytime I attempted sewing them, the result was far from satisfactory.

There are several reasons for that: I do not sew with jerseys (yet!) and most commercial wrap-dress patterns are designed for stretch - probably to mask any fitting issues. Also, I fall into petite sizes, so often need to adapt shoulder/ sleeve area and the wrap adds complexity. And even the best indie patterns do not have shortening lines on their wrap dresses.

On my fails, there is this example - faux wrap dress which I wore several times but it is far from being my favourite, and I must admit, the black is hiding some of its imperfections. I have also sewed one in orange which ended in a bin rightaway.

Then there was this one - Burda 107-09/2015 - where I should have read the fabric recommendation and sew from a stretch fabric. And I did not. Disaster assured. Ended in a bin.

So when last year September Burda published a PETITE wrap-dress pattern from wovens (Burda 113-09/2017), I decided to give it another try.

The thing is, the skirt and sleeves are supposed to be cut on biais, which might add to the fluidity of the dress. I had this poly-something fabric which was flowy and at the same time heavy enough. I only had 1.5m of the fabric and the pattern recommended muuuuuch more, mainly because of the bias cut. I played puzzle for half of my evening and somehow managed to cut it out. I had to piece the ties, though, and I must have cut the shoulder-sleeve area slightly too tight (can you guess the result now?)

Contrary to what the pattern proposed, I wanted a very clean finish on the inside, because c'mon, it is a wrap dress and it is not lined. So I added a facing to the waist from a very fine black silk to cover all the seams and I was very happy about that. Apart from that, all the seams were French and the hems invisible. I do not think there was another option on that.
Because of the biais I let the skirt and sleeves hang for two day to make sure I get the length right.

In the end, I still did not like the dress. It does not crease and moves really nicely, it fits rather well on the neckline (for your reference I added 3 cm on each of the biais part!!! the Burda model is wearing a cami underneath). However, the sleeves and armscyes were just too tight to allow me free movement of my arms.
And then there is the fabric. I chose it because "black with something on it" is my go-to colour combination, on the detail view it has a very nice structure and even a little bit of sheen in it. However, when seen from a distance I find the fabric little bit blah and it seems to make me even more pale than usual.
All-in-all, I looked at it from many different angles, wondered what to do with it and in the threw it in the bin :o))

Then, I was offered the Eve Sew Over It dress for X-mas (not that my BF just knows what to offer me, the pattern was on my wishlist). It is a wrap dress for wovens and sewn by many bloggers. I sewed a muslin (normal, no petite sizes here) and was heavily disappointed! A lot of excess fabric in the shoulder area (ok, I am used to this, that's my usual adjustement we are talking about), but also strange tension on the right side of the wrap and sleeve, while this is not happening at all on the left side. I am a strongly right-handed person and my body is probably little more developped on the right side, but not sooo much.
I went back to the blogosphere to see the if anybody else had the same issue only to realize that a vast majority of the Eve dresses were sewn with the flouncy short sleeves, so not special fitting issue on the sleeves required, there you go! Even on me, the pattern fitted rather nicely without sleeves.

For the Eve dress I am still in the muslin stage, but be assured, there is a happy end to my "sew a wrap dress" story...