liesl’s gelato dress with drawstring

Hello friends!

Did you have fun with our Gelato sew-along? I certainly did! And since it’s all over, I thought I would show you how mine turned out.

As you may remember, this was my inspiration and my fabrics. I chose Essex linen/cotton from Robert Kaufman, as well as a metallic linen from Gray Line Linen in New York for the trim.

And here’s how it turned out!

I’m very pleased with it. Here’s the back

In the end, I didn’t lengthen the dress. The drawstring shortens it a little bit, but for this silhouette I felt it was just the right amount for my personal preferences. (The dress in my inspirational photo is a little too long for me.) I eliminated the double-welt pockets for simplicity’s sake, but if I was going to keep them I’d just lower them by a couple of inches so they wouldn’t interfere with the drawstring casing.

I used the blouse cutting line to line up the bottom edge of my drawstring casing, so that part was easy. If you’re short-waisted (or maybe even normal-waisted–I always lower the waist by 1″) you might want to raise it by an inch or so.

And I added the metallic linen to the bottom edge of the sleeves after they were hemmed. That way I could make sure the selvedge of the fabric covered the hem. I really like the effect, and the way it coordinates with the drawstring itself. It’s too bad you really can’t tell the linen is metallic in these photos.

This is an easy, comfortable dress to wear. I’ll probably take it along on our return to New York in a couple of weeks because it’s pulled-together enough for the city but cool enough for those notorious hot, sticky summer NYC days.

If you try this, I’d really like to see how it turns out! And if you joined the sew-along we’d all love to see how your dress or blouse looks, too! We hope you’ll tag us #lieslandco and #gelatoblousedress so we can see, will you? And if you haven’t tried the pattern yet you can pick up your own copy of the paper version of the Gelato Blouse + Dress right here. The pattern is also available in our extended sizing 0-20 and 16-30 in digital format.