Liberty of London Anneli

Named Patterns, Anneli Dress. Full stop.

Ok, so I have friends who literally flip out every time Named Patterns release a new collection. The patterns are very modern looking, and kind of on the European side of fashion. Clean lines, with a twist on classic style. I had yet to make the plunge and actually purchase a pattern, until their latest Playground Collection. Somehow the Anneli dress pattern managed to jump right on into my shopping cart and makes its way onto my home computer. (Weird how that happens sometimes – lol).

The Anneli dress pattern is offered as either a dress or shirt, with a double front wrap style. It is just simple enough to be worn as an everyday dress, but has the clean lines and chic feel that can be dressed up for evening.

For the occasion of sewing up my first Named Pattern, I ordered some Liberty of London knit fabric that I had my eye on and got to work.

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Liberty of London Anneli Dress

Make this Look

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MAKE THIS LOOK:

• Time needed: 3 – 4 hours
• Skill level: Advanced Beginner

Easy Wrap Maxi Dress

• Pattern: Anneli Dress, Named Patterns
• Fabric: Liberty of London Dufour Jersey Knit Paper Garden Forest White

Thoughts on Pattern:

I love it.

Need more than that? Lol – ok, at first I was cursing this pattern. Not gonna lie, I hated piecing the paper together. But that was only because it took a bit more reading on my part to find the page number. I am used to easily being able to see a large number, or pattern markings that tell me how to piece together paper without having to think too much. Named Patterns does have page numbers, but the writing is really small – so I needed to really LOOK in order to get it. But once I jumped that ‘hurdle’, and settled into the fact that I was sewing an upscale pattern – I was able to get my groove on.

Seeing as how I was sewing the maxi dress version, the pattern pieces were very large (as to be expected). This means that I needed to pull out my super large cutting mat in order to accommodate cutting the fabric of this pattern. If you don’t have a supersize cutting mat, then you will need to cut out the pattern with fabric scissors laying flat on your floor (no rotary cutter). The pattern pieces were minimal, which I LOVED. And super easy to sew together. In all honesty, I think the hardest part was simply getting the pattern cut! Once that was done, I sewed this dress up in under 2 hours.

I used my favorite new sewing tool, ThermOWeb Soft Stretch Lite to help aid in the sewing of the jersey fabric. I am telling you, this stuff is MAGIC.  The very last thing I wanted was for any hemline or front wrap hem to be wonky, and the Soft Stretch worked like a charm.

Of course, anytime you are cutting into Liberty of London fabric you tend to break a sweat. But this dress couldn’t have turned out more beautiful. The pattern is professional, and yielded fantastic results. I cut the size 10, following the hips size chart instructions, but I think I will size down and cut the 8 next time. Or at the very least, do a better job grading between the bust and hip as I would like for my armsyce to be just a bit smaller.

I definitely want to sew another Anneli in a basic solid. I think a classic jersey knit black with a thin rope belt would look really nice for Summer date nights. That being said, I have kept the pattern readily accessible for hopefully another round at the sewing machine in the next few weeks :).

Thanks so much for stopping by, and until next time…

Happy sewing!