Hello lovelies, it’s been a while since my last blog post but I was moving house and setting up my new sewing room🤩 This is the first garment coming from the studio; so we creating, we riding the sewjo roller coaster and there’s going to be lots of dancing 💃🏽 August is Ogden month and I absolutely love this pattern. I’ve made 3 of these so far and I would call it a tried and true pattern for me. Before this, I hadn’t tried a hack and with the smell of spring in the air and this beautiful floral Ankara fabric, it had to be done.

The Pattern

The pattern is from an Indie pattern company called TrueBias (click here to buy the pattern), I think I love this pattern because it was the first time I connected with the sewing community. I had just joined seamwork and I asked what beginner friendly patterns would people recommend in their community. Several people responded recommending this pattern and I totally understand why. After making my first one, it became a wardrobe staple for me. I can wear it to work with a cute cardigan or on chilled weekends, it’s really is that versatile. When I posted my flashback on my resort wear cami on IG earlier this month, Pelumi had recently gotten the pattern and she proposed we do a collaboration to celebrate Ogden month. Here’s Pelumi beautiful version that she cut on the bias. Check out her blog @pelumz_secrets.

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Fabric

The pattern calls for light weight fabric such as rayons and crepes but you know me and my love for Ankara 😍. Spring is fast approaching and I’ve had this bold colourful Ankara fabric in my stash for a while now and thought it would be perfect. So even though I love Ankara, I’m not a fan of large prints, I prefer smaller or geometric prints but something drew me to this fabric and it worked well with the pattern. After making this dress, I love the fabric even more.

The Great Hack

So I don’t own any Maxi dresses, when I was thinking of making this hack, I actually had to double check my closet. Over the years I’ve given clothing away and I realised that I no longer own a maxi dress. I also knew I wanted to do an exposed ruffle because I love a little drama 😂😂😂 ok, I like a lot of drama.

• Large print ✅
• Bright fabric ✅
• Tent maxi dress ✅
• Exposed ruffle ✅
• Melanin from head to toe ✅

So yeah, I come through with the drama sis 😉 I wanted something very relaxed and that would be easy to style. I decided on having a tent dress to start. To give the pattern all around volume instead of just the extending the sides, I slash and spread the front and back pattern pieces. Even though I was using a cotton fabric, I wanted to retain the pattern characteristics of great flow and drape. I drew 4 lines about 6cm apart, and spread by 5cm, 8cm, 8cm and 5cm respectively. I realised that this was a whole lot of volume and I wouldn’t have enough fabric if I want to have a proper ruffle so I reduced some of the volume on the side by drawing new side lines. Then I lengthen the pattern so it was 110cm (I’m not very tall), this was way too long as I had to reduce it by 10cm when I was fitting the dress. To avoid having sharp and dragging corners, I curved it up 2,5cm. When I first fitted the dress I still had dragging corners and needed to curve it by about 10cm to get even rounded corners. I did all this for the front and back pattern pieces.

Next I traced out the necklines of the new front and back pattern pieces and created new facings. Since I was using a cotton fabric, I made them about 6.5cm long including seam allowances. I fuse them with interfacing and they lie nice and flat.

Sewing was fairly easy as I sewed it as per instructions, because of this, I forgot to add pockets. 😳 Sis, listen, pockets are a serious must for me, the dress really lost it’s shine for me when I realised my mistake, and I immediately rectified this and added pockets. The shine came back! 😅 I don’t think I want to say much about the ruffle except 5 meters of fabric hemmed on both ends, gathering 5m of fabric and attaching ruffle to the dress 😅 I underestimated the effort. The dress almost lost it’s shine again. Next time I hack this, it will be a plain slip dress! But looking at these pictures and wearing this dress makes me feel so beautiful, it has all the shine 🤩🤩

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Thank you for visiting my blog lovelies, I hope this post will help create your own amazing Ogden Cami Dress with all the drama!