I am pregnant, and am ready to show the world!  Well, at least my coworkers.  After months of wearing baggy shirts, I’m ready to make a form-fitting dress with my long sleeve sheath dress tutorial.  I want to show off all my new maternal curves.  So today, we’re going to make a sheath dress, plain and unadorned, but one that fits to your body.  Since I am pregnant and hoping to wear this for a little while yet, I’m going to add a little bit of room around the midsection to accommodate some belly growth.  It’s still quite cold outside, so this one will adorn long sleeves.  For those pregnant ladies out there, other dresses you can make that will grow with your bump include Simplicity’s 1360 dress, my Breezy Trapeze Dress Tutorial, and my Double V-Neck Boxy Dress Tutorial.

The skinny:

The Long Sleeve Sheath Dress tutorial is pretty simple.  The trick is to find a nice knit material that has some stretch to it so it hugs your body.

Materials:

• 1½ yards of a knit fabric (I used a micro interlock fabric)
• matching thread

Now onto my Long Sleeve Sheath Dress Tutorial

Instructions:

MAKING THE PATTERN

1.  Grab a shirt, pencil skirt, and a long sleeve shirt that fits you well along with some pattern paper.  Try on the shirt and skirt together and mark the spot on the shirt with a pin where the skirt begins.  Lay the shirt and skirt over your pattern paper making sure that the shirt and skirt line up where you marked with the pin.  Fold in both arms of the shirt and trace around the shirt and skirt as one big piece.  Cut this out, fold it in half, and trim the edges to make both sides symmetrical.  This will be the back of your dress.

2.  Make a copy of this pattern.  Fold it in half and adjust the neckline to your liking.  This will be the pattern for the front of the dress

3.  Next, the long sleeves.  Take a piece of pattern paper and fold it in half,  slide it under one of the arms on your dress pattern and orient the fold along the top edge of the sleeve.  Trace around the inside of the sleeve.  Take your long sleeve shirt and line up the beginning of the sleeve with the armpit lines you just drew.  Draw along the length and bottom of the sleeve.  Using a straight edge, draw the bottom of the sleeve as a nice straight line, curving only at the armpit.  Cut this out.  Open it up to see the final design of your sleeve.  You can double check your work by lining up the sleeve to the dress and making sure it matches.

4.  Last we’ll make the neckline linings.  Using your front and back dress pattern, trace out a copy of the front and back necklines.  Make these linings 2″ wide.  Cut them out.  Fold them in half and cut ½” off the end of each to make them 1″ shorter than the necklines on the dress.  The slightly shorter neckline linings pieces will help keep the shape of your necklines nice and taught and not saggy.

Now for the fun part! The sewing…

MAKING THE DRESS

1.  Pin/trace your pattern pieces onto the wrong side of your fabric adding your desired seam allowances.  Make sure to orient the grain of the fabric so the stretch goes from side to side for your dress pieces and along the width of the sleeves (see diagram above).  I traced my pattern pieces onto the fabric using white pastels.  Cut these out.

2.  Take your dress pieces, right side together, pin then sew across the top of each shoulder.

3.  Next, the neckline.  Right sides together, pin and sew the ends of your neckline linings together so it forms a circle, of sorts.

This neckline lining should be slightly smaller than your actual neckline.  Right sides together, pin the neckline lining to the dress.  To make sure it is put on evenly,  first pin each seam of the neckline lining to the to top each shoulder, then pin the middle of the front of the lining to the middle of the front neckline, and then the middle of the back of the lining to the middle of the back of the neckline.  Add more pins as you want (I will add 4 more for 8 pins total), but you may have to stretch the neckline lining to make sure it fits.

Sew these together with a ½″ seam allowance, stretching the neckline facing as you sew.  (You want to make sure you leave enough material to be able to fold over into the neckline.  I make my neckline linings rather wide after having a bad experience with a neckline too narrow in width).  Trim off the excess fabric of the lining  on the side near the neckline from the ½″ seam allowance you just sewed.

Fold over the sewn neckline lining fabric on the side away from the neckline lining and tuck it into the inside of the dress so you see right side of the seam.  Pin in place the lining on the wrong side of the dress and sew with a wide straight stitch.  If possible, use a ½” allowance.  I actually did two stitches here.

4.  Next we will attach the sleeves.  Right sides together, match the middle of the shoulder part of the sleeve to the shoulder seam on the dress, pin the sleeve in place, making your way down to the armpits.  Sew this with your desired seam allowance.  Repeat with the other sleeve. Trim off any excess fabric.

5. Right sides together, Starting with the end of your sleeve, pin and sew along the bottom of the sleeve, to the armpit, and along the side of the dress down to the bottom of the dress.  Do this for the other side and cut off any excess fabric.

6.  Hem the bottom of the dress to you desired length.

7.  Finally, hem your sleeves.  I like the length of my sleeves so I just did a zigzag stitch at the edge to keep the fabric from fraying.  And that’s everything.  I hope you enjoyed my long sleeve sheath dress tutorial!