So you all know how much love I have for the Dress 47 pattern from Cali Faye. (I went on and on about it here if you missed it). It’s a really cute summer dress with a tie front detail. I made mine out of a denim blue linen with a buttoned skirt pattern hack.

I knew from the get go that I wanted to do a jumpsuit hack of this pattern too.

I was sent some black linen/ rayon mix fabric from the Like Sew Amazing online shop for this make!

I decided to marry two patterns together rather than try to draft something new and I chose the New Look 6446 jumpsuit to do it!

I’ve made the 6446 jumpsuit as culottes multiple times before (see it in action here) so I knew it would fit. I like the style – that wide legged cropped pant with angled pockets just works so well.

The only question was how to mash the two together?

The first thing to do was to measure the waists of the NL6446 pants and the Dress 47 waistband to see how much of a difference there was. In the sizes I used there was a 1cm difference where the waistband was slightly bigger.

To compensate for this I planned to sew the culotte side seams with a 1/2″ seam allowance instead of the 5/8″ it’s supposed to have.

The other thing I noted at this point was that though the measurements weren’t too far off, there was a big discrepancy between where the side seams were. I decided to just not let this bother me as I was using a plain black fabric and knew no one would be able to see this seam anyway.

The New Look 6446 jumpsuit uses a zipper in the back but I want to change this to the front just to make it easier to make and get in/out of. This involved a little more work because I now needed to add a fly front!

Luckily all my jeans making this year has helped get my mind around those!

In other words I blatantly ripped off the style of my Ginger jeans (and general instructions) to do this!

So firstly, I added a curved element to the pattern of the front pant. I also cut out a fly shield piece of a similar width so I had two pieces that looked like this.

I made my fly in the opposite direction to the jeans. Traditionally jeans will button up left over right in a “men’s” style but a “ladies” trouser will go right over left.

This meant I had to think of doing everything the opposite to what my brain wanted to do!

I have to say, once you’ve put in a couple of fly zippers they do get a lot easier and actually mine came out pretty neat. It’s all practice people, practice!

For the top half of the jumpsuit I kept the bodice pieces of Dress 47 the same. I halved the waistband piece lengthways to form an outer band and a facing and extended the centre fronts to compensate for the extra fabric of the fly. This keeps he waistband slightly long than needed but at this point it’s better to have too much than too little!

To put it all together I made the bodice and attached the waistband as normal.

I then sewed the outer waistband to the top of the culottes, matching the centre backs.

I added some elastic into the back waistband to help keep it cinched in.

The excess seam allowance was folded under and hand basted into place before being top stitched down.

I finished off the waistband with a slider clasp to close it.

And ta-da!

A culotte jumpsuit!