Make a Kimono Wrap Dress | Easy Sewing Pattern | Full Tutorial

Look at that movement! That is why you get a viscose crepe. I'm going to make this wrap dress with Japanese kimono sleeves. It's really cool. It's quite a simple pattern. It fits a lot of sizes. I'm going to show you how to do it right now. Grab the pattern. It's in the description. Sew along with me and make your own kimono sleeve wrap dress. This is a very versatile pattern that goes with so many different clothes. I've chosen a nice bright fabric so you can see what I'm doing but also to show you how beautiful a statement outfit you can make with this incredible pattern. The fabric is really special for this. It's a viscose crepe. I'm going to tell you more about it but have a look at the way it drapes. So when you're having a look for fabrics, a viscose crepe is a really great way to go and you get all this fluidity and movement that you want when you're making a kimono dress like this one. I'm going to be using this viscose crepe with a slight crinkly texture so it's like a plissé. If you can see, there you go. See that? I have 270 centimeters of this fabric which is just under three yards. A little bit less than three yards and it's 140 centimeters or 54 inches wide. So it's going to make an incredible kimono dress. I'm going to press this and then I'll get to cutting. So you'll see in the pattern that we need tie. This is the sleeveless kimono wrap top. You can get this pattern in the description as well. It's a beautiful little top and it's got little plates at the shoulders here. It also has this sash, these ties, and it loops through the garment, comes out here and then ties around and that's what we're going to be making. So the first bit of fabric that we cut off is going to be divided up to make those ties and we need two of them. Now I've got more than I need here so if I want I can make extra wide ties. I also like this with extra narrow ties like really sort of narrow almost like ropes and of course you can make the ties out of something else. So instead of using the fabric that you're making the dress out of you could make this out of a contrast and have something really quite dynamic going on with your dress or top. So you see that this is where you can really do it. But they are sewn into the garment so it's not something removable like in a gathered skirt that I make. It's something that is sewn in so that's a decision you make at the start. But imagine if you found a rope in the exact same colour as this in a beautiful fuchsia that would look incredible really wrapped around the dress really elevated I think as well. So that gets cut up and turned into two ties and that's the first thing I do. I do it straight away so it's done and I don't have to do it halfway through the construction process. There are eight batten pieces they're all nice and big and they're all pretty easy to deal with and manipulate to change the size as you can see. We've got two ties, two sleeves, two backs, and two fronts. Let's get to sewing. We've put together our ties now we start constructing the actual dress. The first thing you need to do is join your centre back and sew that. Because of the way that we construct this garment what we do now is treat the raw edges of the sides of the dress. That's because in here we're going to have our kimono sleeve attached and it's far easier to put it on when you've treated this edge first and also where we're going to have the opening for our ties. So it's up to you how you want to proceed with this. I'm going to just overcast it with an over casting foot on my machine but you could turn this back twice so you could do one two turns back like that or anything like that but I'm going to overcast it and then it will be turned open when we do this seam but it's doing it now is the point. Now we bring together our shoulders line them up like so and sew across. Now I'm going to do the neckline and which is also the front of the dress. So what we're going to be doing is turning it twice and see here I've already pressed back the neckline and all the way down to the front of the dress I've pressed it back once by a quarter of an inch or five mil. See like this all the way down and I'm going to sew that down but first I'm going to insert the tie into the seam as well this is high stress this is the tie so we're going to be pulling it and stuff. So my advice is start up at the center back neck work around go down one side stop then come back and go down the other side. So here is where we pull this across now that it's all nice and pressed and we position it where it will be and get really tight and pressed into that position and then I'll do a nice stitch there to hold that in place and hold it facing out of the garment because that's the way it will be used when the garment is worn. See like that and then I'm going to sew across there to really hold that in place. Now we are lining up our sleeves and attaching them this is what makes this a kimono dress we're putting these big beautiful sleeves on and the best thing about it is like when you make a kimono is that we sew the sleeves on flat. What I mean by that is is that we have the garment is in a 2D state two-dimensional we've got this big flat plane here to which we will attach our sleeve and it's as simple as lining it up right sides together like so and you bring your notches together like that and you sew from A to B that's it. You put in a couple of extra stitches at each end because this is a high use area that gets a lot of tension so you need to be able to strengthen the top and tail of this seam but it is a straight seam so it's a very very satisfying sleeve to attach especially if you're used to sewing regular garments where you're sewing them inside a 3D shape so you're dealing with ease and you're you're doing all of that kind of stuff this is far simpler this way it's very nice to do. So I've got the end of my sleeve there's the sleeve there going on so the bottom of that kimono sleeve carries on here like that so I've got a little mark just next to it that's one centimeter or about half an inch below where this meets the side seam and that's to give this room so it just moves around a bit and I'm using a viscose crepe so this is really pliable really drapey fabric the stiffer the fabric you use the wider you want this little gap to be and it can come down to it can come down to about four centimeters it can be 10 centimeters in Japanese sewing this is called the miyatsu gucci so there would be actually you wouldn't start sewing a side seam until about here about sort of two inches sometimes three sometimes four inches below the sleeve and that's because women need to get into their garments when they're dressing in kimono so they have a hole to go through and it lets the sleeve fall nice and flat. Now we have quite nice fabric here it's not the longest sleeve so we don't have to do that we can come up to it but you still don't come right up to the end of the stitching with your kimono sleeve you want to give yourself a little bit of room to breathe just there and that's not going to show up in wear but it just means that all the seams coming into this junction can come back out nice and flat without having to clip into them and then you can see there's two more marks so this is side seam and then I've got to stop here and that is where the tie will pass through now in the pattern the instructions give you a specific gap there and that's because we use a specific width of our tie but I've actually made a slightly bigger tie simply because I had more fabric so I'm just using that as a guide and you know you don't have to make this exact they're just once one side and it should pass through what you do that for is in case you have a a sash or a tie that's sort of this wide you don't then have a tiny little hole for it to pass through you need to make sure there's enough room and then beyond that is the rest of the side seam all the way down to the hem and then we'll talk about how we treat the side seam afterwards so I'm going to do this little bit first and then carry on with the side seam. So what I've done is I've kept that part and pressed it open and you can see here we've got the opening for the for the tie to pass through and then we've got our sleeves with a tiny little opening there just so it gives this it gives the end of the sleeve room to move about. It's time now to close the sleeves so what we're doing we're getting the sleeves this part stays open the sode furi this is called which is the back of the sleeve that sits next to the side seam so on a traditional feminine garment in Japan this is left open again for the same reason as that miyatsu gucci that I talked about so that the wearer can get into their garment but it also helps the sleeve bag fall nicely so all I'm going to do is sew along here close this up and then turn and sew up here to the cuff which we already have marked so we've got a cuff opening and then the bag will be closed and they'll clip into that corner and turn it all out and then this part here next to the side seam will be left open as well and we'll turn once it's all together we'll turn this back and then just sew that down really quickly so it sits inside the garment do a double turn with the cuff now we hem and here she is isn't that incredible look at this bright bright fuchsia viscose and see this I've talked about this throughout that weight of the fabric really drapey viscose crepe so it's gonna do the most beautiful drapes you'll ever see which is why it's so good for a kimono sleeve like this oh that is lovely so as a kimono style robe this is absolutely stunning but there is a reason we put in a little opening in here and this is exactly why so get your sash and it's like any wrap dress we're just feeding that through like so then by doing that we pull across this side and then it's just a matter of tying it into the position you like and the great thing about this is because these ties are so so long you can wrap them around a few times to really get that almost like an obi aesthetic as well to your dress oh that's looking fantastic so I'll tie a bow and then I'll sort of shift it around isn't that fantastic and this is the magic look at those beautiful sleeves falling down there with a little armhole here so I actually put my hand up through you can see the hand comes out there these lovely kimono Japanese kimono sleeves I've got I love this color it's so bright so fantastic this would look amazing with anything navy so if you have a navy jacket or something in the berry family plums red wines and burgundies all those kind of things that's going to look fantastic with this bright color as the base underneath and so when you take off your jacket more of the color comes out that's the point of it so you can see the movement look if I move the dress around like this you can see that's that viscose crepe so that is what you get from that very very different to a plain cotton or a linen with that fluidity and it's what you want when you're making something like this so you can see here as well if I bring it up close where these fall to in wear so it looks absolutely beautiful really so if you have the extra fabric to make a wider tie like I have here then all the better for you because what you get is a really nice big statement bow here and you can see I talked about it at the start when we were cutting but if you have a contrast fabric that you're happy to sew into your dress that it would really look incredible you can imagine a beautiful gold braid or something coming across here that would really set this off it would look incredible but this is fantastic there you have it the kimono dress with Japanese kimono sleeves the pattern is in the description I'm kimono alex this is house of kimono follow me for everything about kimono