I am so excited to be sharing this pattern with you all today.

Today's pattern is the FREE So Sew Easy Fit and Flare Dress. I was actually asked to blog this pattern by a member of the Pattern Reviews and Resources Facebook Group. Like me, they'd had a lot of fails with free patterns and were afraid this would be yet another bit of frustration. If you're paying attention to the photos, you're probably thinking, that is NOT a dress. Don't worry, we'll get there!

Right away I was able to take a look at the pattern and see that it looked ok. Sometimes you can tell a pattern is a bad one just by looking at the lines. I will say I LOVE that the pattern drafting is similar to my body shape. I was able to use the Size C with just an FBA without having to grade any seams. That means if you're an inverted triangle or rectangle shape, you won't need to make as many adjustments to this pattern.

So i printed the pattern using my size only. When I printed my size, I ended up with a few lines that didn't match up to anything. It was sort of strange, but I was still able to figure out which cut lines were mine, so I kept going.

I already knew that I would need a full bust adjustment, but with a princess seam, that's actually pretty easy. But doing the adjustment on a full length dress piece is a hassle. It involves a lot of paper and I didn't want to feel like I was wasting fabric or paper in case this was a complete fail. So I did a little math and figured out approximately where to cut to make a shirt. I probably could have measured a little better (but as you can see it turned out ok).

So I did my full bust adjustment and started sewing. The pieces matched up perfectly. Like so perfect I was worried that I made a mistake somewhere. But I kept going.

I'm so excited to say that the photos you're seeing are my muslin. I actually used some black cotton lycra from Purple Seamstress (my favorite) and a piece of scrap from my Girl Charlee Knit Fix. I barely had enough of the contrast but I'm so glad I used it, even though I couldn't line up the print perfectly. I added a nice little waistband at the bottom to pull it all together. I should have made the band a little more snug, but otherwise I'm really happy with the over all shirt.

And look at this shirt. OMG. It makes me look skinny and like I have a waist. If you want to catch the illusion, take a ruler and hold it up to your screen. You can see, I don't have a waist indentation. I'm quite the inverted triangle. AND this pattern makes my bust look more proportional to my body. Normally I look so top heavy, but now I look balanced and like I have a waist and hips and everything!

This pattern has a tiny little truing problem in the shoulder seam. But it is super easy to fix up. Just use a square edge and even out the shoulder seam on the sleeve side of the contrast piece. And really, if you don't, you're just going to get a tiny little "blip" in your shoulder seam and you probably won't even notice, its THAT tiny.

I was a little disappointed that the pattern didn't include a long sleeve. I know, I'm so greedy! But I took the few minutes to draft out the long sleeve and even made the full length dress. Check back on Thursday to see photos of that.

All in all, I really LOVE this pattern. I've so far got a shirt now and a dress ready to wear. And I can see sewing up a LOT more of these.

If you would like to see me review something here on the blog, feel free to reach out to me, either here or at my facebook page, Organics by Ti.