Sloan Sewalong: How to Sew a Sheath Dress with a Bubble Sleeve

The Sloan Sewalong is a step-by-step video series designed to guide you through sewing the Sloan, from choosing your size to finishing the final details.

In this sewalong, We walk you through each stage of the process in short, focused lessons. You can move through the videos at your own pace, pause as needed, or skip ahead if you’re already comfortable with certain steps.

The Sloan is designed to be fitted, featuring darts that extend into a tuck below the waist on the front, fish eye darts on the back, a slit along the center front seam, and lined gathered sleeves. It has a high, round neckline and closes with an invisible zipper at the center back.

To follow along, you’ll need the Sloan Pattern. Seamwork members can download it as part of their membership, and non-members can purchase it individually in the shop.

Getting Started

Fabric recommendations: Look for stable medium-weight woven fabrics such as linen, linen blends, sateen, chambray, shirting, quilting cotton, rayon, brocade, taffeta, and satin.

Fabric qualities to look for: The bubble sleeves are the stand-out feature of this dress. Consider the effect you want when you’re picking out fabric. Drapier fabrics, like rayon and linen blends, will give you softer bubbles, while fabrics with more body, like brocade and taffeta, will give you more pronounced bubbles. Fabrics with a crisper hand, like shirting, will lend a crisp effect to the sleeves, while fabrics with a softer hand, like double gauze, will give a fluffier effect.

Seamwork members, take advantage of your member deals this month! You can save up to 20% off your order here.

Prepare to Sew

This lesson covers all the basic things you need to know to get started with this sewalong. If you’re a beginner, this will be really helpful to watch!

If you feel like you already know how to get your pattern and fabric ready for sewing, go ahead and skip to the next lesson and you'll learn to do some helpful fitting adjustments.

You're going to learn how to:

• Select a pattern and reference its skill level


• Select a size


• Prepare patterns and fabric


• Cut and mark fabric

Fitting Adjustments

In this video, you’ll learn some helpful fitting adjustments for the Sloan dress.

Shoulder Width

The shoulder seam is intended to end at your low point shoulder, or where your arm bends. This adjustment will help you add or remove width at the shoulder while preserving the armhole length, so you won't have to make any adjustments to the sleeve. You will do this adjustment on the front and back pattern pieces.

Hip Width

You will want to select your size based on your bust measurment and adjust the hip width as needed. Perform this adjustment on both the front and back pattern pieces.

And here are some additional fitting resources if you need them:

• Follow this tutorial to lengthen and shorten a sewing pattern
  


• If you need to adjust the armhole depth, use this tutorial.


• If you want to blend between sizes, use this video tutorial.


• To adjust the shoulder slope, follow this tutorial.


• 
  Here are fitting tutorials for the shoulders and sleeves.


• Here are tutorials for wide or narrow shoulder adjustments
  


• Here are tutorials for small bust adjustments and full bust adjustments.


• If you prefer videos, there are bust adjustment videos in the Hansie sewalong here.

We created a free downloadable PDF called the Four Height Zones to help you gather the information you need to make adjustments to your pattern where you need it. We recommend printing it out and writing your height measurements on it to keep in your sewing journal.

Compare these measurements to the corresponding landmarks on your pattern pieces, and you'll know how much you need to shorten or lengthen that part of the pattern.

Sewing Instructions

The PDF instructions will be your main guide as you work through this pattern, but we've created this video to walk you through the trickiest steps in detail. If you need help on a step not shown in this video, check out the Community Group Sew, where other Seamworkers and staff are ready to help out!

The trickiest steps for this pattern are:

• Install invisible zipper (02:14)


• Finish neckline with bias tape (07:34)


• Sew and attach sleeves (12:16)