Halt! Who goes wear?

There's a particular kind of halter neckline that is 'in' at the moment that I really like. (Someone tell me if there's a more specific name for it – 'sleeveless raglan' just confuses people.) It's popularity, however, does not appear to have crossed into the commercial patternmaking world (leastways, not since the 70s. Again, if you know something please tell me.)

I've bought a few dresses and tops in this style but not as many as I would like. Then I found some lovely red and black paisley chiffon that I thought would work well for one. I gave up looking for a pattern and pulled a dress out of my wardrobe and took a pattern from it.

Side note: I bought this dress in New Zealand in the couple of hours we had to kill before catching the plane home. New Zealand had a completely different set of dress shops from what we have in Australia which took me by surprise. This puts me in the position of having my most favourite clothing chain closed down and my second most favourite is in another country.

Really, most of the pattern is pretty straight forward. The only difficulty comes from the neck band. I don't think I was able to get the shape quite right by tracing an already made up dress but it will do. The finished product does feel a little tight at the front while sitting a little too loose at the back, but I'm not sure how to change that.

Before jumping in with my nice (and expensive) chiffon I decided to make a mock-up from something cheap but with the intention of being able to wear it too. I found the perfect fabric on the Spotlight sale table. It's awful! So synthetic it feels like plastic and it has a camouflage print with gold specks so it's all shiny. I was very pleased with it – and only $3 a metre.

The dress was cut and sewed quite quickly. I think something went wrong when I was making the skirt patterns as I ended up with one front, two side fronts, two side backs and two backs but the front and sides were enough to get around me. I wondered if I had just traced a side panel twice but the original dress definitely has all those panels. Still, after leaving out the back panels I've got a dress that fits and that's what matters.