The latest issue of Fibre Mood is filled with a ton of patterns that I fell in love with straight away. The Mindy dress was no exception!

This dress seemed to hit on a ton of summer trends that I’m loving right now – a square neckline, exaggerated puff sleeve, gathered skirt. It couldn’t be more on point for what I want to make at the mo!

I loved the idea of making it in a sheer fabric. I wanted to create these dramatic sheer puffed sleeves. I toyed with using an organza but when I rummaged through the stash, I ended up finding an even better fabric! I found a piece of black (what I assume is) poly cotton devoré that I got in Walthamstow market many years ago. It feels like a cotton voile but has these “burnout” patches – in this case of a floral design – which are see through. I felt it would create enough sheerness to achieve the effect I wanted and still have plenty of body for that puff sleeve to really work.

I wanted to tweak the pattern a little to suite me so I ended up adding an extra tier to the length to create a full length dress. I also added a cuff to the sleeve hem rather than use elastic there.

Because the fabric is a bit sheer I decided to line the dress. I used a black cotton lawn to line it and I essentially used the original bodice and skirt pieces for the lining layer and sewed it in in a similar way to the facing, just extending the stitch line along the length of the underarm. It worked a treat!

I made a straight size 42 with no alterations to the sizing.

Eeek! I just love it! I can see why it’s such a popular pattern from this issue! It’s fulfilling all my gothy, vampire’s wife fantasies!