Tilly's Coco in Chevron Stripes

Here is my third Coco by Tilly and the Buttons. 

I am really loving this pattern for it's versatility. It's such a blank canvas that's so easy to make your own. Here are my first and second Coco's.

For this one I used the same shape with the narrowed skirt, as I did in version two.

I chopped the sleeves off short because I wanted this dress to be suitable to wear to work during the warmer months. In hindsight, I should have added a little width to the sleeves to make them a little looser fitting and improve the look. I did make the underarm length of the sleeve about 2cm shorter than the outer side. Hope that made sense?

The back does have a little wrinkling going on at the waistline. I didn't have this issue with Coco number two, so I am hoping the fabric will relax and drape better after a couple of washes.

The fabric is a chevron printed ponte, in navy and white, purchased from Spotlight back in July. The chevron stripes actually ran parallel to the selvedges. I was quite disappointed when I realized this, because I had pictured this dress with the stripes running horizontally. This fabric was very stable and there was little difference in the amount of stretch running either way, so I took a chance and cut the pattern so that the stripes ran horizontally as I wanted. This worked out fine. I tried to position the darkest part of the print to the waist area, to create a slimming effect, with the lighter parts at the shoulders and hemline.

I sewed this dress on my sewing machine using a very narrow zig zag stitch. This gives the stitching enough give so that it doesn't snap when put under a bit of pressure. I could have just used my overlocker, (but I would rather unpick a single line of stitching than an overlocked seam) if I make a mistake. I did go back and finish off the seams with the overlocker after I was happy with the fit.

Chevrons were impossible to match at side seams.

During the cutting out stage, I thought long and hard about matching the chevron stripes at the side seams. After much head scratching and Googling, I decided that it is impossible to match chevron stripes on curved seams. (Please correct me if I am wrong.) I did the best I could and made sure that at least I had the same width chevrons continuing from front to back. I was pretty chuffed with my seam matching at the underarm intersection.

I turned the hems up 2.5 cm and top stitched with a twin needle. I really like this finish, and if you measure accurately you can position the top stitching right on top of the raw edge, making a very neat finish on the inside.

The neckline looked like it might gape a bit, so I stitched some clear elastic (slightly stretching it as I sewed) to the neckline, using a zig zag stitch. The edge was then turned under (enclosing the elastic) and stitched down using the same twin needle finish as the hem lines.

This has worked well and the neckline sits nice and close to the body.

I omitted the pockets for this one. I thought the print was busy enough without pockets.

 I don't think you have seen the last of this pattern yet. I still have quite a few other ideas I want to try out and this is a great comfy dress suitable to wear to the office too.


Happy Sewing