Sewing a Layered Maxi Dress + Free Sewing Pattern + Tutorial

I thought it was finally time that I shared with you a pattern that I've been wanting to try for a long time because it's super simple and I know there's many sewing beginners out there that are looking for the perfect project for them to start their sewing journey with clothes. I also know many people start sewing other things rather than starting off with clothes, but if you're looking for your first project or if you're just looking for some sewing inspiration no matter your skill level, I have the perfect suggestion for you. We're going to be making a smock dress. It's this I say long but you could actually make it shorter if you'd like. For this project we'll make a lot of gathers but I promise you it's super simple and I'm going to show you how to make the pattern for yourself which is the most exciting part and it'll take just a few minutes. So yeah let's just get started. I'm first going to show you how to make the pattern and then I'll show you an overall view of how the sewing will look like. I actually just cut the fabric and I'm super excited. It's so so pretty but before I show you that let's just make the pattern. Okay so let's get into the pattern tutorial. You'll be surprised on how easy it is to create a pattern here. Welcome to ito.com. Here I make all of these patterns and you see on our videos which by the way you should check out all of the videos we have already because there's a ton of sewing inspiration but what I usually do is go to straight to design tools over here and once you click that you'll see that ito has a ton of patterns you can choose from. Dresses, pants, jumpsuits, a lot of patterns. So there's endless options for you to choose from but as you know we're going to be making a dress today which actually is our smock dress and if you're new to iClo this pattern is completely free for you to download if you want to try it out. So let's just create that and once it loads you'll see that there's an avatar wearing the garments. As you can see this dress has sleeves but I'm not going to be using the sleeves so don't mind them we'll just leave it like that. The first thing you have to do is select your avatar so you go over here maybe you've already used iClo so you have your avatar created as I do but if not you can just create one with either of these three options you can extract your measurements from a photo of yourself and it really really works I promise I tried it in another video and compared my measurements from the photo to my actual measurements that I took on that spot. You can select standard sizes or enter your measurements manually so whatever you prefer you can do that. Over here we have a slider that helps modify the overall fit so if you'd like it to be a little bit more comfort you'll see that it's a little bit tighter on the body which I think it's actually a really nice look as well but I want it to be a more towards the relaxed side as well so let's just move it over here and it looks nice as well the sleeves I'm going to leave it 3 4ths but I'm not going to be using them I will be printing that pattern out but it doesn't matter I won't be using them and for the neckline let's go for a deeper neckline I like a more of a deeper neckline and I'm also going to be modifying the back panel so I can have a bigger v-neckline over here but I'm going to do that once I print out the pattern so for now I'm not doing anything to the back and as for the length of the dress I actually like the maxi let's see how it looks for a mini dress I think I like the maxi more so let's just leave it at maxi length perfect and I'm going to be using a brown fabric so let's choose a brown fabric here this is too red maybe like this perfect you could also change the fabric here but I'm just going to leave that dress fabric because it actually looks a lot like the fabric I got so I think it's a pretty clear visual of how the dress is going to look like I also wanted to show you that over here if you go to fit map you'll see how tight or how loose it'll fit on the body so for example the red means it's touching or it's a little bit more tight there on the body for example the darker blue means it's not touching the body at all and these would be our pattern pieces that we will print out if you go to advanced mode you'll see that you can modify a ton more of the parameters and actually change the measurements yourself for some sections of the pattern but I'm not going to be changing anything from there because I really like how it's looking right now so I'm just going to save my project and now I can just download my pattern but first I'm going to show you my favorite tool on iCloud you probably get bored of me telling you this every single video but for those who are new here if you go to the textile calculator you can see how much fabric you'll need for each pattern as you can see this pattern does have quite a large second tier which is this one here on the bottom of the dress but since it's a rectangle what I'm going to do is just print it out normally and I'm going to cut it in half and since this piece is meant to be cut on fold what I'm going to do is just cut the half four times that way it'll fit on my fabric because my fabric is 150 centimeters wide and most of the fabrics that you'll get on a fabric store are that wide and now to download your pattern you just go over here and select everything for it you print it out however you like I always go for pdf the because I love printing this at home and then I just download the pattern I also wanted to show you what it looks like what the document looks like once you download it you'll always get this first page which helps you test the accuracy of the pattern in other words it helps you check if your printing settings are okay so what you do is just print out the first page first so only this page you measure this out and if it is 10 by 10 centimeters exactly it means your printer is set up correctly but if it's not you'll have to check again the second page is just a pattern layout so you'll see how you're going to glue all of the papers together well at least in my case because I'm using a US letter format this is a second tier and as you can see as I told you it's going to be cut on fold it says it's here but I'm going to cut that in half and just cut it four times so it'll be easier to use my fabric for this and the rest of the pages is just the pattern okay so over here I have my printed pattern pieces so it's all ready to cut on the fabric and I also have my fabric I've used this fabric before and I absolutely love it it's light flowy yet it's not see-through I love the grainy texture it has and I absolutely love this color I am obsessed with darker colors and this fabric just called my name as soon as I saw the tone and the color and actually I'm going to be modifying a little bit on the pattern the back doesn't have a huge open neckline but I am going to be modifying it so it has a big v-neck on the back as well very similar to what it has on the front already okay so first we have our back panel our front panel and our sleeves but as you know I'm going to be making it sleeveless so I'm not going to be using this pattern piece at all so I can just get rid of that and I'll save it if I have another project I want to use it with and for these pattern pieces I'm actually going to be cutting two for the main fabric and two for lining as well for this one this one is meant to be cut on fold on the front but before we cut this one we have to modify it so we can have the v-neck that I wanted on the back what we have to keep in mind is that if we're going to reduce this size we have to match it then with the front but I'll show you how so I'm thinking I could move about five centimeters here and just trace this line so we would cut off this space that's left over here and to trace that on the front we're going to do the same now the shoulders are going to be the same width and I can connect this like this I just realized I need to cut this I forgot so now I can just trace my line perfect and that will be my new neckline and now we have our new back and front panels as you know this is not necessary at all it's just a simple change I want to make for my dress but you don't have to make it and it's just fun to show you that even though you print out a certain pattern it doesn't mean that you have to sew it exactly how it's shown on the avatar you can modify it as long as you know it'll work at the end when you sew it so now I can cut those pattern pieces we also have our first tier which goes right below the front and back panels and this one's cut once unfold and we have our second tier it's so big that I had to fold it in half so it could actually fit on my fabric so I would definitely recommend doing that as well so once you fold it in half like this you're going to cut it four times so you'll have two for the front and two for the back okay so I've cut all of my pattern pieces already and as you know for the first tier we have only one panel that's got unfold and for the bottom tier we have four panels none of them which I cut unfold because it wouldn't fit on my fabric if your fabric is longer it's wider sorry than 150 centimeters then it might work but in my case it didn't but since that panel is just a rectangle it doesn't matter where you cut it as long as you sew all the pieces together for it to be the entire width of the panel if that makes sense okay so my plan of action is first making the entire upper section of the dress and then connect that to the first and second tier so I have both of my front panels I mean both because because as I mentioned we are going to be lining the entire upper section of the dress we're not going to be lining the lower section it's not because the fabric is see-through it's just so it has a better finish on the neckline front and back and on the armholes and I also have four of these back panels so we're going to sew that and form the entire upper section of the dress so I already have my front panel attached to my back panels like this on the shoulders and I did that too for my lining as you know now we're going to attach them together that way we can have our upper panels ready but basically both of them should look like this right now the back panels are not attached in any way together just the shoulders to the front panel so this will basically go like this and now I'm just going to press the shoulder seams and attach that together now we just have to make sure that we attach them right sides together I'm going to sew from here all the way here up to the other side and each armhole together like this okay so I totally forgot that I initially wanted to add two straps on the back that you can tie over here just below the shoulders just to make sure that the dress won't fall off your shoulders so I quickly made it two straps with the same fabric that I used for the dress and I'm just going to pin them about four centimeters or three centimeters below the shoulder seam on the back panels this is totally optional as well but it will make you feel more secure while wearing your dress if you did do the opening like I did just make sure they match on the same place and now I can sew it normally and sew on top of this when you're sewing the shoulders closed make sure that this isn't coming out from there because the straps will be stuck there too so just make sure to pull them into perfect I've sewn all of this and I'm going to grab my scissors because I have to make some notches on some specific places this is so that when we flip it inside out it looks so much nicer so especially here and on the curvier edges of the armhole after that we can open up here and pull out the back panel through the front panel now I'm going to give it a really nice press look how nice it looks now that I've pressed it all and as you can see the only thing that's missing basically for the top would be closing the side seams so what we're going to do is to face them right sides together the front with the back really important that you match the seams and we're going to sew with a straight stitch and we're going to do the same on the other side now our upper panel is ready just look how nice it looks and this is the back with the ties with our sides and as you might have seen I also attached these two pieces together and just sewed like a little triangle there just to make sure this is all closed okay so over here I have two of my four panels for the second tier and as you know ideally we would have one entire panel that was cut on fold but since the fabric wasn't wide enough I had to cut four panels that when sewed together on the sides will complete the entire second tier panel so what I'm going to do is to pick one of the sides and I'm going to sew that with a normal straight stitch from the top to the bottom and I'm going to attach the four panels this way until I have a huge rectangle perfect so I pinned all four panels in place and I'm just going to sew them and make sure that I also zigzag stitch so you'll have a really long panel as I said for example this is one two and we're going to fully close the entire rectangle on the other side so grab the other side with the one that's left over and place them right sides together okay I wanted to show you before I sew it how it's going to look it's basically like a huge rectangle or a circle that we're going to gather for the lower tier that's why it's so so big and the first tier will be basically the same we just have to sew it on the open side right sides together straight stitch and a zigzag stitch you could also do a french seam if you'd like or if you have an overcast machine you can also use that to finish off the raw edges now we're going to start attaching the tiers and we're going to start with the first one which is this one and as you know the design has some gathers so what we have to do now is to make two gathering rows on this panel one about five millimeters from the edge and the other one one centimeter from the edge pull from them and then make sure that they're the same width as this top and we're going to do the same for the second tier making sure that it's the same width as the first tier over here if you've never done gathering stitches you have to make sure that you have a really low tension on your machine a large stitch setting so basically the largest you can go and the stitch width you can leave as normal we want the tension to be really low because we have to pull from the thread and super important don't forget you cannot back stitch at the start nor the end of the stitch and try to leave a longer thread tail as you can see i have my two gathering rows basically i just grab two upper threads you don't want to pull from them too hard because you might rip the thread and that's exactly what we don't want so just do it very carefully and start pulling from the thread until this matches the entire lower part of the upper panel okay so this is how it should look right now what we're going to do is sew these two pieces together something you have to keep in mind is that we're going to align the side seam to one of the sides so either this one or this one i have it over here and we're going to face them right sides together like this i'm going to pin it all in place and sew it leaving a one hi guys so i finally finished my smock dress and i'm incredibly happy with the results it looks so beautiful i just ended up attaching the second tier the same way as i did the first one to the upper part of the dress and the last thing i did was make a double rolled hem i think that's my preferred hem for fabrics like this one it was really simple and it looks the nicest and now you can finally see how beautiful the dress turned out and here's the back as you know we attached some straps here on the back and this just helps so this or this doesn't fall off the shoulders and i actually think it gives it a really nice touch it has a really open and low back which i think looks so chic and as you can see it's a super simple dress to make i think it's a perfect project for a confident beginner so if you're up to a little challenge you can definitely try this out there's no zippers or anything involved which is amazing so yeah i'm just going to try it on and show you how it looks on me and we can compare it to how it looked on the and obviously as you know the avatar does have some sleeves but we did not attach them you can if you would like and i just wanted to remind you guys that this pattern is free for you guys to try out if you're new to iclo so you can download two of any of the free patterns if you're new to iclo and this is one of them so i highly recommend trying it out it's really nice and i think it's a dress that fits for every occasion it's really loose comfy yet it's really feminine and elegant so let me just try it on and show you how it looks on me this is how the dress looks on me i absolutely love it um as you know you can modify the pattern however you'd like so for example if you'd like a higher neckline you can definitely do so but as i mentioned i really like a lower neckline i think it's so comfy as you can see it's super flowy and it looks so pretty with this dress you can just put it on and call it a day you have an outfit already which i absolutely love and look at the back i think it looks so so pretty so nice and the tears definitely give it that special touch i love how the gathers look and i'm definitely going to make this dress again what do you guys think?