So sew easy In a twist dress hack

During me made May I saw a hack of this dress on Instagram, @katrynarae. She blogs at Boots and Cats. Here is her post about this dress.  

I was immediately in love and wanted to copy it straightaway.  I didn't realise that it would require a lot of different moving parts...I read her blog post a few times and mainly got the point that I would put together the tshirt part of Plantain with this dress. Seemed easy enough.  I neglected to think about how she had a lot of trouble doing all this!

The pattern for the dress is here: https://so-sew-easy.com/twist-front-dress-pattern/

I would never have considered this pattern.  I don't like it.  The tank top cut and the length don't appeal, and the website makes me suspect you're getting a low quality product because it's full of ads.  I did have to pay money to get this pattern.  

I was not at all impressed with the pattern.  Considering that I did pay money for it, I expect a PDF to be relatively painless to put together.  A painless pdf has a marked line at the border of the pattern, showing you were each piece ends and where the overlap is.  A painful pdf has no such lines.  This pdf didn't provide any edges so I had to literally tetris edges together, cutting at the edge of the marked lines to approximate pages.  It took about 2 hours instead of 15 minutes.  I would not recommend this pattern. I now see there are knot front tutorials and I think it would be more educational and less painful to do it yourself.  

I cut a size 2 based on the size chart but sized up to a 3 on the back piece only below the waist.  This was good and matched my plantain size ok.  (I use size 36 in Deer & Doe most of the time.)  

I did possibly overthink things.  The dress had a 1/4" SA and the plantain had a 5/8" SA so I took off the tshirt SA before I overlapped them. (I'm not sure it mattered since I was using the plantain above the waist in its entirety.) I matched them at the underarm, then using only the plantain above that, as well as the shape of the plantain until it matched the dress which was halfway to the waist.  

This year I am trying harder to use fabrics I've hoarded, so out came these lemons which are precious to me.  

The instructions were ok. I think I have already stated how much I passionately hate instructions which consist of colour photographs so I don't need to dwell.  I find the knot part unsatisfying because it leaves a lot of edges raw.  There's a triangle to the right of the knot which, when I wear it, makes me feel like I have a belly pooch.  Overall the dress is really interesting, it's longer than I usually wear, fits perfectly well, and looks good.  I also went ahead and used my new and terrifying coverseamer on the sleeves and hems so although they are not perfect, they are STRETCHY!!

Droopy triangle visible on the left here

The result: might take a full summer of wear to get a verdict but I'm glad I made this and I will probably never do it again.  Not everything deserves a muslin.  Also I was reminded how awesome the Plantain is and how I should do frankendresses more often.