Choosing the right fabric for your Juliette Pattern

The first pattern in our Dreamy Collection, Juliette, released this week! I have seen several questions about fabric choice, so thought I would do a quick blog post on my favorite fabrics to use and why.

My favorite fabrics to use are a medium weight, stable, 2 way stretch fabric. You can use lighter weight and 4 way stretch, but your dress will grow longer with wear. For older girls who are starting to develop you definitely want to use a stable 2 way stretch- ponte, fukuro/liverpool, or scuba/techno would be great . These are going to cover, smooth and are going to hold it’s shape better.

This dress is a 4 way stretch poly spandex. My daughter wore this for DAYS, both day and night, by the 2nd wear and many, many twirls, it started to “grow”. Meaning the vertical stretch started pulling the dress down. The ruffles are extremely lightweight nylon chiffon.

This dress is a 2 way stretch sequin on the front and ponte for the rest. I got both locally downtown, but you can search “sequin mesh back” to find on fabric.com. This dress is more stable and held it’s shape wonderful. The roses are a lighter weight ponte with a double skirt-top length layered over dress length.

This grey one was made from Hobby Lobby jersey. Now this isn’t the best quality knit and it doesn’t have great recovery, but I wanted to test it out. It wore much better than I anticipated. Not much sag or growing. The roses was my very first pre test and also a jersey.

These ones are cotton lycra. It works wonderful with custom knit panels for the front bodice! 1st dress is Art Gallery knit (Millie Fleur line), top is custom knit from Backstitch Fabrics on facebook and last my niece’s is Riley Blake knit with nylon chiffon ruffle.

These fabrics are all from Hobby Lobby too. I decided to use a pre gathered lace on my nieces to see how it would look. While it is much faster, it is very costly… which is why I didn’t add it as an option in the pattern. For future reference if you happen to find some trim at a great price or have lace on hand, here is how to figure yardage…. First you need to look at how many WOF for that size, times 60, then divide by 1.5 and then divide by 36 it should be about that… so if it takes 12 WOF’s total, 12 x 60 = 720 ÷ 1.5 = 480 ÷ 36 = 13.33 so about 13 1/3 yard. It took 12 yards to make my niece’s size 6 dress.

This one I did a full stretch lace overlay over a thin, 2 way stretch poly blend. This poly blend was from the flat fold table and really too thin to use on it’s own, but with the lace overlay it helped stabilize the knit and worked great.

Now I did not use a rayon blend but several testers did. You want to be careful with these since they tend to grow and be on the thin side. Here is Catherine’s gorgeous version in a rayon blend with rayon blend ruffles too.