i’ve been a fan of wendy mullin since around 1993, when i first discovered her custom guitar straps and indie-rock clothes at two of my favorite record stores (we still called them that back then). i remember buying a kelly-green corduroy mini skirt, with a little faux patent leather buckle on the patch pocket, which i wore incessantly. i thought it was brilliant that she was selling her offbeat clothes in music stores, targeting her market precisely. since then i’ve followed her career with admiration (and frequented her sample sales) and was beyond thrilled when in 2006 she penned her first sewing book and began producing (with a little help from simplicity) patterns for budding home seamsters. i have been using wendy’s built by you patterns in my sewing classes for several years now, and find the customizable styles the ideal mix of hip yet wearable.
the much-anticipated release of wendy’s third book, built by wendy dresses, couldn’t have arrived at a better time. the sewing revival has spawned a new generation of stitchers with skills and sophisticated taste, but the sewing pattern industry still seems to fall short of their needs. and personally speaking, lately i happen to have a hankering to wear nothing but dresses, yet somehow inexplicably own very few.
in dresses, wendy breaks down the three basic dress shapes: the sheath, the shift and the dirndl. she also identifies five general body types (pear, boy, hourglass, athletic and average) and discusses which dresses work best for each type, though, amazingly, she asserts that every dress shape can be tailored to suit any body. there are three patterns (or really, slopers) included in the book, one for each silhouette. then there are instructions for stylizing the patterns into 25 super-cute variations. she outlines the myriad possibilities which are revealed when you combine options for every element of a dress design: necklines, collars, sleeves, cuffs, length, width and shape. if you do the math, you’ll see that in actuality you could make hundreds of unique dresses from the information in this book!
as she did in her previous books, wendy goes into great detail about the foundation of sewing a successful garment: choosing the right fabric, using the best tools, determining correct size and fit, proper cutting and marking, and how to alter the patterns to achieve the desired effect. sewing does not lend itself to skipping steps! she emphasizes the importance of making a muslin and how to resolve fit issues. she also explains required techniques specific to dresses, such as gathering, seam finishing, facings, linings and bindings, as well as finishing details like buttonholes, zippers, pockets and embellishing with trims.
some of the styles i am most excited to begin playing with are the ‘palm beach tunic’ (a printed shift with solid facings), ‘overall improvement’ (for the farmer in me), ‘american pastoral’ (reminds me of a victorian nightshirt) and the ‘lumberjack dress’ (something inside me yearns for more plaid flannel in my life). honestly, the number of dresses i can envision making from this book could keep me sewing through the next decade.
it will definitely take some time and dedication to follow through the process of altering these patterns in order to make the projects, but the effort will pay off as you build a library of sewing patterns, with interchangeable parts, that you can turn to again and again. and in turn, the closet full of dresses, designed and built by YOU, will be the ultimate reward!
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