Ansley Top and Dress Pattern by Blaverry

First thing to know about the Ansley is that there are lots of options: 

• Top or Dress lengths
• Hi-low or regular style
• Two collar styles or none
• Sleeves: regular, puff, 3/4 length with or without cuff, and flutter
• Hem: regular, bias hem, ruffle hem

I decided to do the tunic length hi-low top with puff sleeves. (You may notice my sleeves aren’t puffy, I’ll get into that in a bit).

The Ansley is a loose fitting style so take that into consideration when choosing your size. Silly Bean is tall and skinny so generally when sewing I need to mash sizes a bit. I forgot about that this time though. *sigh

At a 20″ chest she fell into the size 2T, but she has the shoulder width of a regular 4-year-old (I’m supposing since she’s slightly above average height for a 4-year-old). Since I figured that the 2 would not fit her properly through the shoulders, I decided to do a 3 width, and was going to cut a 4 length but totally forgot and did the 3 length as well. So it’s a little short. I also changed the suggested hem length so it would have been even shorter had I not.

I totally messed up my gathers here. I only did one row of gathers, I know I know, bad me! In my defense I was sewing at 2 in the morning.

All in all the pattern is good although I had some issues. The sleeves didn’t puff. The designer has been informed so that little kink should be worked out soon.

The pattern is geared for advanced beginner/intermediate, mainly due to the placket I think. That part was confusing for me but mainly because it was the first time I’d done a placket that way. The instructions are minimal but fairly straightforward but it would be best to have some knowledge of garment construction already before tackling this pattern. 

More things to know:

• Huge size range: 9m to 14
• Size chart and fabric requirement charts are in both metric and imperial
• The PDF has the layers printing option so you only have to print the size you need
• Printing guide makes it easy to print just the pattern pieces for the pages you want
• Instructions include diagrams, not photos

Anyway, even with the sleeve issue I’m not deterred from trying another pattern from them. I like the designs and the fit on this one was great (and would have been better had I cut the proper length for my daughter, ha!)

 
Check out the rest of the stops on the Ansley tour below!