Archer Shirt Dress Hack

You may have already seen this dress on my Instagram. I might have mentioned a few times that I have been drooling over this OffOn green corduroy shirtdress for over a year:

I have been plotting how I am going to achieve the hack for some time now. I couldn’t find any perfect green corduroy so I went for this rust colour but sort of wish I had waited. Because I knew I had changed the colour, it wouldn’t be the same as the inspo and so it meant I kind of ran out of steam on some of the other hacks. It was way easier to make a shirt bodice and attach a gathered skirt than making a shirtdress with a full placket like the one pictured. I do think this could be achieved by combining the Grainline Archer pattern I have with the Sew Liberated Hinterland Dress. I also decided not to add the pocket flaps as I don’t have any existing patterns with pockets like that and I wasn’t in the mood to try and figure out the construction for myself.

All that is to say, I definitely made a dress inspired by the green one but it is not an exact copy. As far as hacks go, this was a really easy one! I measured down to the waist of my Ellis Dress pattern piece and folded the Archer Shirt front, back and placket pieces to that length. I then constructed the shirt exactly as written in the pattern until the point I was told to hem it and at that point I added a skirt instead. I cut two rectangles for my gathered skirt pieces, again using the Ellis Dress pieces for reference. Of course, it had to have pockets, so I used the pocket pieces from the Sew Liberated Metamorphic dress as they are bigger than the Ellis which was the other pattern I had to hand.

This was a sponsored post for Minerva who very kindly sent me the corduroy and the gorgeous brass snaps so there are more pictures and information if you click here.