E&E Ruffle Top pattern : a review, tutorial, discount code and give-away!

A few weeks ago, Heidi from Elegance & Elephants and I almost simultaneously released our first ever patterns-for-sale. We’ve been online friends for quite a while now, and as we really like each other’s style, we decided to do a little swap: I would use her fabulous Ruffle Top Dress, while she would give my Bubble Dress a try (check out her version here).

While I thought her original Ruffle Top dresses were absolutely adorable, I was blown away even more by the little pattern hack she did for the Kids’ Clothes Belgian Style series: she replaced the ruffles with piping, and the bias collar with facing. The result was amazing.

So I decided to do the exact same thing. Picking the fabric took me forever (I changed my mind about 15 times) but eventually I went for Alexander Henry’s Golden Garden in Teal (bought here). When the fabric arrived, though, I started having doubts all over again: the flowers were a lot larger than I expected, and there were these instances of gold paint, and didn’t that Chinese character look rather cheap, and, and, and, … I was pretty sure that the finished dress would look like a Carnival’s costume rather than a nice Summer’s dress, and with Carnival still being ten months away, that wasn’t really a good prospect.

Luckily, when the dress was fininshed, my fears turned out to be completely unnecessary, and that has everything to do with the brilliance of Heidi’s pattern. The simple lines and perfect shape helped me make one of my favorite projects so far, and Norah was really happy with the dress too.

The pattern comes with very clear and detailed instructions. On top of that, the dress is also easy to assemble and therefore a pretty fast project. In fact, I think what I spent most time on was placing the patterns on the fabric. I wanted the print to continue through the piping, and I also wanted no Chinese characters on the dress. After about two hours of trying, though, I had to conclude that it would be impossible to exclude the Chinese characters entirely, so now there is one on the back of the dress.

In the original version of the pattern, the neck line is finished off with bias ribbon, and so the back opening has a separate ‘placket’. For the adapted version, I used facing for the neck, and I decided to draw one single facing for the neck and back opening. In the picture below I show how I did this – it is super simple, and a really easy and fast way to finish any dress with such an opening.

Would you also like to give this great pattern a try? Heidi is giving a discount to StraightGrain readers. For the next five days, the code STRAIGHTGRAIN gives you a $1 discount on the pattern.

In addition, you can also win the pattern. 

To ENTER the giveaway you must:

1.   Follow StraightGrain via Bloglovin’, Blogger, Facebook or email

 

2.  Leave a comment below in which you let me know which version you would make (top, swing dress, A line dress, or A-line dress with piping instead of ruffles?)

 

3.  For an additional entry, follow or like Elegance & Elephants

 

The give-away ends Sunday night Eastern Standard Time. Good luck!