Our Melba Dress is a speedy and simple project that's ripe for hacking. Leila and I have both made Melba's with attached gathered skirts and we love them as breezy summer dresses!
This is the Melba with the Front and Back pattern pieces cut off between the notch for the sleeve and the upper notch for the pocket.
The skirt is 2 rectangles that are simply the full width of the fabric (so 137cm) front and back. Our preferred method for gathering is to sew 2 rows of gathering stitch (longest possible stitch length: 4-5) 1/4” (6mm) and 3/4” (1.9cm) from the
edge. For this I sewed 2 sets of gathering stitches from the side seams, matching the side seams of the skirt and top and then gathering as needed.
The pockets are inserted with the same method as the original Melba pockets (similar to the method shown in this Lobethal Shirt sewalong).
The skirt is 90cm long, with a slight adjustment to cut to a light stripe so that when I hemmed the skirt there would be a darker stripe along the bottom.
I used slightly less than 4m of this 137cm wide seersucker fabric. I used a more stable rayon/tencel for the pockets and neck facings which I used to ease the shifty seersucker in to. You can see how I calculated how much fabric I would need here.
Save on our Dresses
This week we're running a little sale on dress patterns! Use the code 12ONDRESS at the checkout and the discount will be applied automatically (until 1st December 2023)
We've got 6 dress patterns and 1 dress expansion- see them all here.