How to Make a Patchwork Dress

Lately patchwork dresses have been all over my social media feed, and I absolutely love the look of them. Not only are they fun and unique looking, but they are great for using up fabric scraps, which is a win in my book. Last summer I made a patchwork Skyline Dress, but I wanted to make dress with sleeves this time. Enter the Syd Tie Patchwork Dress!

Y’all. It turned out better than I ever imagined. I can’t get over how perfectly the fabrics all go together, and the fit of the dress is *chefs kiss*. I teamed up with Carriage House Printery for this fun project, and used nine different fabric designs by Melissa Johnson Design. Today I’m going to walk you through the process of converting the Syd Tie Dress (by Sydney Graham Patterns) into a patchwork dress. And best of all, once you know the steps, you can pretty much convert any pattern to have a patchwork construction!

How to Make a Patchwork Dress

Step 1: Pick your Pattern

When choosing your pattern to convert into a patchwork dress, I suggest looking for one that could be easily broken into “pieces”. Sydney has a Youtube tutorial on how she did this with the Skyline Dress, which I highly recommend watching! I also like looking for dresses with tiered skirts to make it easier to add extra patchwork details without too much brain power.

Step 2: Pick your Fabrics

When it comes to fun fabric designs, I always go to Carriage House Printery! They have thousands of prints to choose from, and so many wonderful fabric choices as well. When it comes to woven fabrics, my favorites are either the Kona Cotton or Organic Cotton Sateen. For the patchwork dress I used the cotton sateen!

To make sure all the fabrics would go well together, I stuck to one designer and picked fabrics with the same color scheme. I also made a collage to make sure I liked them and had a good combination of solids/big prints/small prints.

Per the pattern fabric requirements, I needed 3.5 yards to make the size 12 dress with sleeves. So I ended up ordering five 1/2 yard cuts and four fat quarters. Upon cutting fabric I noticed that I could actually have made the entire dress (except the bottom portion of the sleeves) with only fat quarters, which I found pretty cool. So if I had wanted to use even more prints/solids I love knowing I have that option as well.

Step 3: Cut the Fabric

This is definitely the most stressful part of making a patchwork quilt. You have to be precise about cutting out the right fabrics to make sure everything flows well together. The last thing you want is for the designs to clash with each other.

To do so, I made sure all the fabrics were the correct size for the required pattern pieces. Then I laid all the fabrics on the floor and began to mix them around to see what would look better where.

Once I was happy with how it looked together, I cut the pieces out of the designated fabric. I use a projector so it made this process a little more difficult because it was harder to envision the full dress with all the pieces. But if you print your sewing patterns, you can lay out the pattern piece with your fabrics to really see how the dress will come together.

Step 4: Prepare the Skirt and Sleeve Pieces

To make it a little extra “patchwork looking”, I added a few inches of different fabric to the bottom of the sleeves (also because the length of the fabric was not enough for the full sleeve length). I wanted that extra bit of fabric to be the same as one of the front bodice pieces to make it all coordinate better, and it turned out so good.

I sewed together the two fabrics for the sleeves, as well as the eight skirt pieces (four per tier) and finished all the seams so they would be ready to go when assembling the dress.

Step 5: Follow the Pattern!

The rest of the dress was assembled by simply following the pattern instructions. The only “variation” from the instructions was that I had already sewn together the skirt pieces, and I skipped adding pockets.

Before sewing together the skirt tiers, I laid out the dress and played around with the two tiers to see what fabrics would look best together. I offset the top tier so there wouldn’t be a “seam” down the entire front of the dress. This also helped make it look more patchwork-y.

Step 6: Admire your handiwork

Because you earned a little moment of primping in front of the mirror! ;)

Want to use the same fabrics as my dress? Here is what I ordered from Carriage House Printery (in cotton sateen):
1/2 Yard Cuts:
Vintage Park Toile in Natural Monochrome
Ditsy Watercolor Floral Yellow
Vintage Garden in Vanilla
Stacks in Brown
Dusty Blue Solid

Fat Quarter Cuts:
Sawtooth Quilt Star in Ivory Brown
Lola Branch in Mist
Isla in Denim
Queen Anne Lace in Mustard

Leave any questions you have in the comments section! And let me know if you give this patchwork dress a try. :)