Pink Poplin Hazel Dress

If you have been following me here or on Instagram for any length of time, you may have noticed that I’m a fan of clothing with gathers. I love a voluminous skirt or sleeve! This project is the most gather-licious garment I have ever sewn. It’s the Hazel Dress from a new-to-me designer, Veronica Tucker! Without further ado, here she is, in all her gather-y glory!

I found this pattern through total serendipity. Christine Haynes was posting on her Instagram stories with the results of some polls she’d been doing about what patterns she should teach, which had timed out by the time I stumbled across the results. One of the patterns she was considering was the Hazel dress from Veronica Tucker, and I literally gasped when I saw the photo of it. It was this one, and I instantly fell in love with the plethora of gathers. But neither the pattern or designer were listed in the story I saw since it was the second part of the poll discussion. Luckily Christine responded promptly to my message asking what the pattern was, and I snapped it up as a PDF pattern. I mention the fact that I got it in PDF format because I need to give fair warning that the PDF assembly was a beast! The pieces for the second and third tier are so wide! It was definitely a marathon assembly session to get it together. I would still do it again though, because I think with the length of the pieces that I would find it hard to keep things equal width if I tried to trace the measurements onto the fabric. You might have more skill than me at that, but just wanted to put it out there!

The dress itself was relatively easy to construct – the top yoke is fully lined so it was easy to finish the edges around the front keyhole with ties inserted. The fact that the sleeves and torso/bodice are gathered onto a continuous edge at the bottom of the yoke made things easier to deal with. The top gathered edge of all three tiers is a straight cut, so if you wanted to throw in some horizontal stripes, pattern alignment wouldn’t be too awful! I actually (VERY gradually) sewed this while I had covid a few weeks ago, and I had already sewn the yoke by the time I tested positive so it was mostly gathering. This was a good type of sewing task for my foggy brain! Unfortunately, my sewing machine had a temper tantrum by the time the last tier rolled around. I think it probably needs a bit of a clean out/tune up, but I was in quarantine so I couldn’t do anything about that and I wanted to keep plugging away at the dress. So…I gathered the last tier by hand. I do not recommend it. If you look closely, you might be able to see that the gathers don’t look consistent with the other areas of gathering. That’s mainly because by the time I got full around the giant tier with hand sewn gathering stitches, I couldn’t face doing a second line of gathering stitches like I’d normally do on a machine. So I left it at one line. I can live with it, but basically I’m saying that if you ever find yourself tempted to gather something by hand, I would just recommend that you do it as a uniform technique for your entire project if you want to keep the same look throughout for your gathers.

I wanted to make sure that I included lots of photos of the dress “at rest” in this blog post. So often when a dress is super voluminous, it’s tempting to only include fun photos of the dress held to its full width or little videos of the dress swirling in a beautiful blur. I love those photos and videos! But sometimes it’s hard to find as many photos with the dress hanging as it would be more likely to in day-to-day wear. So those photos are above and below. And I really love how this dress looks both ways, both in motion and “at rest”! This dress is sewn in a cotton poplin that I got from Patch, which I was honestly not sure about. It felt like it could potentially be too structured. I think in future I want to try a midweight linen for a more rumpled look, but I am super pleased with how this one turned out. I think the poplin really helps the dress to keep a good amount of volume even when it’s not being swirled, and I imagine it will relax a bit more after multiple washes. It’s already surprisingly soft, counter to what you might think based on its appearance! I made a size 14 based on my full bust measurement (40″), even though I was temped to size down based on the volume. I’m glad I didn’t size down because my bigger shoulders from swimming and climbing are often the obstacle in fitting into a single size column, and this is not fitted anywhere except the shoulders! The awesome thing about Veronica Tucker is that even though her patterns only go up to a size 22 (48″ bust, 40″ waist, 51.5″ hips), if you don’t fit into her size range she will draft a size specifically for you at no additional cost if you provide your measurements!

The bottom of the sleeves are finished with elastic, which I usually avoid because they feel constricting and irritate me. I decided to try the elastic on the Hazel anyway, because it seemed like the way it hangs would keep it from being tight around my forearms or wrists. And I was right! I don’t mind the elastic in the sleeve at all, and it was an easy way to finish the cuff without having to do even MORE gathering! I think the instructions tell you to do the sleeve cuffs early on in the construction, but I was going completely rogue during the entire garment and ended up sewing them last so I was out of gather-gusto. I don’t think I’m going to be sewing anything with gathers any time soon – I need a break! But I’m super happy with this dress and love how it turned out! I hope more people make their own and try out Veronica Tucker – she’s only a got a few patterns out so far, but I think she has a really interesting aesthetic.