Chasing Daisies Dress: MN Darling Ranges
As I mentioned briefly before, I’ve been obsessing with dresses lately. I’ve always loved dresses, but the last few years, I was more drawn to casual pant styles. After two years of wearing a lot of leggings and sweatpants during the pandemic “stay home” phase though, I’m now fully into wearing beautiful dresses and that’s pretty much all I want to wear at the moment.
You know I’ve made so many dresses in the past, however, I’ve donated most of older ones by now. My figure has been changing since I started doing more exercises about 2.5 years ago, and my taste in style has also been shifting; in result a lot of dresses didn’t either fit me properly anymore or I wasn’t feeling them anymore.
Since my closet is lacking the variety of dresses right now, I’m on a mission to fill that gap! After I made the Black Cosmos dress, I started planning on a new one.
The fabric I used
I came across with this beautiful fabric when I was online shopping (I check out several online fabric stores often for fun), and I immediately wanted to make a dress out of it.
It’s by Art Gallery Fabrics and this is part of their “Shine On” collection. This particular print is called “Chasing Daisies”. Purchased from Thread Count Fabrics.
If you look closer, the print is on the dark green base colour which is so pretty! With the brown lines of the flowers and the yellow leaf, the colour palette sort of looks like sunflower. Because the tone is very earthy, I think this would look great through summer to fall.
The pattern I used
AGF makes one of the highest quality of quilting cotton in my opinion; it’s smooth and lightweight. It feels quite different from more affordably priced ones, actually.
But, as beautiful as this fabric is, quilting cotton is still a bit tricky to find a right garment pattern for. If you don’t choose the right pattern, the garment can end up looking too bulky or feeling too stiff.
This time I tried Megan Nielsen’s Darling Ranges dress & blouse pattern. (The curve size which ranges from 14-30 is available too.)
The recommended fabric for this pattern is light to medium weight—while quilting cotton wasn’t listed as recommended fabric examples, I thought it could work fine as the bodice is semi-fitted.
Just as I expected…it did work!
The left picture above is untied at the waist and the one on the right (the back view) is tied.
Darling Ranges has an option to tie the dress at the back (kind of looks like a bow), but instead, I made a long skinny waist tie to put around the waist all the way like a belt.
Here, you can see how it looks on the front when it’s tied at the waist.
Changes I made
The main design changes I made are:
Raised the front neck point by 8 cm (so that the V shape is less deep)
Added more volume to the gathered skirt
Added another piece to the skirt to make it tiered
The fitting modifications are:
Added about 5-7 mm to the back centre fold (so 1-1.4 cm altogether) for better range in movement
Added about 2.5 cm to the centre front so that the bodice can overlap deeper for wider button bands, and to add more ease (Although I think I added too much ease, I would take it in a bit next time.)
I love how the V shaped neck opening came out! The original design was a bit too deep for me, so this is perfect.
I love the wooden buttons I chose too!
The skirt length is about midi on me; not quite maxi but longer than knee length.
Isn’t this print so beautiful? I think this colour palette would look cute in the fall too, with short boots and a cardigan.
I’m really happy with this dress; MN Darling Ranges is a great pattern, I think! It’s versatile and can look chic or casual, depending on the fabric choice. I’m sure I’ll try the top version too.
I get excited when I discover a pattern that can work well with quilting cottons. They are easy to source, sew, and care.
I’ve worn this dress a couple of times already and loved it! AGF quilting cotton is amazing to wear and barely need any ironing (I hang dry.)
Have you tried Darling Ranges pattern? If you have, what did you think? If you have other pattern recommendations for quilting cottons, let me know!
Jun 13, 2022
