Made by a Fabricista: Border Prints Are The Best!

Happy fall everyone! I love making dresses for the cold months. You can layer them with a jacket, wear tights and show off cute boots. I found this gorgeous border print and knew it would be a dress. Right? Aren't the colors just beautiful? This appears to be sold out, but FM always has gorgeous ITY knits (Which are on sale this weekend 11/10-11/11!) and if you search the designer section often, you'll come across some pretty, pretty pieces.

I used my trusty old McCall's 6886 to create this dress, but this time with long sleeves and the midi-length. If you've never seen this pattern, you need to get out more! It's well drafted and ripe for creativity.

Playing with this print was great fun! This time, I decided to use the border on the sleeves and I cut the dress out on the lengthwise grain, paying careful attention to where the various parts of the print matched certain prominent body parts, know what I mean? ;)

I knew I wanted to use some of that fun border on the neckband and that was the highlight (I think) of the front. It gives the dress some contrast and I think it ties the design of the sleeves to the remainder of the dress.

One thing to mention...test the lengthwise and cross-wise grains as you are planning your layout and design. With this particular knit, the lengthwise grain had a lot more stretch than the crosswise, and I knew in the finished garment it would effect the stretch if I didn't pay close attention. With a close-fitting dress, you want the greatest amount of stretch going around your body. That greatly effected my decision on how to lay this out. You can make it work either way, but just know you'll need to adjust somewhat depending on how much difference there is when you compare stretchyness across both grains.