The Saltwhistle Pattern

July 19, 2022July 24, 2022

When I heard Keira Wood was creating her own original pattern for Love Notions I knew I would definitely need to make it. First of all Keira has amazing taste and second, I love sewing dresses! I also had the perfect butterfly Batik fabric from Minerva just waiting to be made into a dress.

About the Pattern

The Saltwhistle Top and Dress is a cute and flirty pattern ideal for

your Spring and Summer wardrobe. It is meant for woven fabrics and

features a stylish square neck design. The unique scalloped hem adds

a beautiful feminine touch. Pair the peplum top with jeans for a casual

day or colorblock the layered dress to turn heads. Take it down a

notch and make a simple dress using just one layer.

Easy to fit and wear with a slightly blousey silhouette and elastic to

cinch the waist. Ladies sizes XS -5X with optional Full Bust pieces.

This all sounded like a win to me. It was just missing one essential thing. Pockets! To make a pocket for my Saltwhistle dress I decided to use a pocket pattern piece from another Love Notions pattern, the Tempo Sundress. It just needed some small tweaks and I wanted it to be a little bigger. Here’s what I did.

The Pockets

The Tempo pocket and the Saltwhistle skirt pattern are shaped differently where they will be attached. The Tempo pocket is curved at the top so I needed to square it out like the Saltwhistle skirt is at the top since that is where they will be connecting.

Using regular printer paper I lined the pocket side up with the side of the paper and then used the top of the paper as the top of the pocket. I traced the top half and then moved the pocket down to the bottom of the paper and finished tracing the rest. This made the pocket about 1.5 inches deeper.

I left the pocket opening the same size as the pattern piece. I wanted my cell phone to easily fit in this pocket and as you can tell, it will.

Assembling Tips

Now, don’t do what I did and attach the bodice to the skirt before attaching the pocket to the skirt. You can still make it work without unpicking, it just makes it harder to attach and finish the edges.

The steps should be:

Attach pockets to sides of front and back sections.
Gather top of front and back sections, stopping at pockets.
Lay front over back, RST and sew from hem up and around pockets. Finish edges.
Fold pockets flat over the front part of the skirt and baste in place.
Attach bodice.

The above picture somewhat illustrates the steps, just imagine I didn’t attach my bodice yet.

Some Simple Adjustments, Skirt length

I rarely make a pattern without adjusting it in some way and this one was no exception. On the pattern description it says the length of the dress is to the knee. I’m 5 ft. 5 in. so I looked at a few of the tester pics and decided I would most likely need to lengthen it a little over 1 inch.

Since the skirt piece is a rectangle, all I had to do was leave the excess paper at the top of the skirt when I was cutting that piece out. It made it almost exactly 1.25 inches longer and I didnt have to add anymore paper on to the pattern.

Skirt Fullness

Another thing I really wanted this dress to have was a bit more fullness. To accomplish this I went up two sizes for the skirt and gathered it a little more to fit the bodice. The results are subtle but I was really happy with how it turned out. If you want more fullness than this you can go up a few more sizes.

I just love this cute new dress! The scalloped edges and the puff sleeve combined with this Batik Fabric make it such a unique piece to have in my wardrobe.

I’m sure the Saltwhistle Pattern is the first of many to come from Keira Wood. So make sure you are following her on the socials. And if you want to get your hands on this gorgeous new pattern The Saltwhistle, grab it this week while it’s on release sale. You can use code KOE10 for an additional discount.