Our favourite hack of the Delilah Dress

This time last summer I made one of my favourite dresses to date. I had found this vintage embroidered scarf in a second hand shop in San Francisco for $6 and been wanting to turn it into a dress ever since.

The bodice from this dress became the starting point for our Delilah Dress sewing pattern which we released this year. We simply swapped out the gathered skirt for a sleeker fitted skirt. However, lots of you have been in touch to say you want to make the Delilah Dress with a gathered skirt instead! So here is a super simply quick tutorial.

Step 1 -

Start by doing a simple pattern alteration on the skirt of the Delilah Dress sewing pattern. You need to add more width into the skirt (which we will then gather in to give it a lovely fullness). Take your Front and Back Skirt pieces (F&G). Measure the top of each skirt piece, then times that number by two and add that much on to the centre front and centre back.

In this example I am adapting the Size 18. The width at the top of the skirt is 25cm so I add 50cm on. This is your new pattern piece. Don’t forget you still need to cut the front pice on the fold if you want to avoid having a seam down the centre front. Fun fact - You might be limited by how wide your fabric is (in my case I could only go as wide as the scarf). Bare this in mind and just make the skirt as wide as you can with the fabric you have.

Step 2 -

Follow all the instructions from the booklet as per normal, but before you attach the skirt to the bodice you want to gather the top of the skirt in. The best way to do this is by lengthening your stitch and dropping the tension down on your sewing machine (on my machine I drop the tension down to 3 but it might be different on yours). Then sew two straight lines of stitching along the top of the skirt with a 1cm and 2 cm seam allowance. Do not backstitch at the start and end. Leave the threads long and loose, so that you can then take hold of the bottom threads and pull the fabric in to the desired width (the original width of the pattern). You are then ready to sew your skirt on as normal. Just make sure you return you machine to its previous settings and sew between the two lines of gathering thread. Once you have sewn the skirt on you can remove the gathering thread.

In my case I left a slit at the side of the skirt because I wanted to keep all that lovely fringing on from the scarf, but you can close up all the seams if you like.

You can buy the Delilah Dress pattern here in printed or PDF format if you would like to make your own version. Hope to see you in a field somewhere soon having a dance in your own Delilah Dress.

Wishing you all a wonderful August,

Lydia x