I am definitely having a little love affair with a matching set lately! I’ve seen them work with tops and shorts or pants as rompers, and Fleurine is here with a tutorial for a two piece dress! Bonus, these types of garments are so great for traveling because you can mix and match!
A little over a year ago, when I was very, very pregnant, I tested the Amalfi Dress. My first thought was to sew an empire version of the dress to accommodate my growing belly, but I wasn’t too fond of sewing something I could only wear for a few weeks. After all – our me-mades are supposed to last, aren’t they?
My solution: detaching the skirt from the top. That way I could wear the skirt over my baby belly before giving birth and wear it at my waist later. After all – I was going to use some of my precious Cotton and Steel rayon fabric! I didn’t have enough of the fabric while testing, so I sewed a contrasting top, with the intention of sewing a matching top later to get the real “dress look”. And that’s what I’ve finally done!
Since then, Adrianna has released the Lucerne blouse and I decided to mix and match a little while sewing my new top. I used the sleeves of the Amalfi dress and the neckline and the bodice of the newly released Lucerne blouse. I liked the shape of the Lucerne and wanted to be able to wear my top both tucked into the skirt and as a regular top. The Amalfi comes with bust darts, the Lucerne without. I have a rather small bust and don’t necessarily need darts to shape a wider blouse. To save myself the step of sewing darts I used the pattern pieces of the Amalfi for the upper part of the blouse and changed to the pattern pieces of the Lucerne from the bottom of the armscye and all the way to the hem.
I also used the shape of the round neckline of the Lucerne Blouse to re-draw the original V-neckline of the Amalfi to a round neckline. That means that I used the facing from the Amalfi for the back (which I didn’t change) and the facing for the Lucerne for the front. They don’t fit together perfectly, but I simply aligned the two pattern pieces along the edges and chopped a little off from one of them to make sure they aligned.
The rest was easy: I simply followed the instructions for the Amalfi to sew the sleeves and the instructions for the Lucerne to sew the neckline facing, the side seams and the hem. Make sure to sew the sleeves to the armscye before sewing the side seams, instead of sewing the side seam first, as you are supposed to do when sewing the Lucerne blouse. As always I followed my love for French seams and used those for the whole blouse.
I made a few changes to my already existing skirt. The skirt is basically the skirt from the Amalfi, with an added casing for a ¼” wide elastic at the top. I didn’t add pockets since those would have been too high when worn over my baby belly. Now, worn at the waist, I needed to make the elastic a little shorter. I didn’t like the length of the skirt when worn at the waist, so I shortened it by 2” by sewing a new, very wide hem.
I think the finished top and skirt look just like the Amalfi when worn together, just with a round neckline. This way my “dress” is suitable for nursing, too and I ended up with basically three pieces instead of just one.
Thank you for reading – I hope you got inspired to do some simple hacking to be able to sew just what you need!
Thank you so much Fleurine! This is such a useful and beautiful hack!