The story of this dress begins with the fabric, a pretty floral rayon challis that I picked up at World Class Textile in Sacramento. When I buy fabric without a specific project in mind, I like to say that the fabric tells me what it wants to become… and this fabric wanted to be a 1960s-style bell sleeve shift dress!

Although the major pattern companies have put out vintage reproductions in recent years, I couldn’t find the right look, so I found a genuine 1967 pattern on Ebay. I love the silhouette of this pattern, which uses long, curved darts to provide subtle shaping through the waist and hips. And aren’t the illustrations beautiful? I am a big fan of anything vintage or antique, so it was pretty exciting to open the pattern and wonder who had worked with it decades before I was even born.

There was only one problem: back then, patterns were printed in a single size, and the size I’d found on Ebay was a bit too small. So I followed a tutorial from the Curvy Sewing Collective to grade the pattern up to my size.

Construction on this dress went pretty smoothly, although rayon challis can be a bit slippery, so I had to battle distortion while cutting the pieces. (One important tip to mitigate distortion or stretching: never let the fabric hang off the table while cutting.)

The finished piece is one of my favorite dresses to wear, and I’ve already made another version – a more formal dress with the lace overlay shown in view 1 of the pattern packet. I can definitely see myself continuing to use this pattern: maybe I’ll try the sleeveless version next.