In excellent curvy sewing news, Cashmerette Patterns’ most recent Club release, the Mansfield Dress, is a great party dress pattern that would have come in handy for you this holiday season if only I had written this post earlier.
The show-stopping Mansfield Dress, the new pattern for December 2024 for Club members, consists of an underdress with a fitted bodice with sweetheart neckline, and an overdress with a high neckline. The overdress is meant to be made in sheer fabrics, but the beauty of making your own clothes is that you can do whatever you damn well please.
Better still, the Mansfield is designed to be fully interchangeable with the Upton Dress, giving you the ability to create the dress of your dreams, mixing and matching skirts, bodices, and sleeves to create so many different styles and so many different looks.
Like with all Cashmerette patterns, the Mansfield comes in a wide size range split into two ranges, 0-16 and 12-32 and with bust cups ranging from C/D to G/H. This translates into full bust ranges from 32” to 62” and high bust measurements from 30” to 57”, making it very likely you’ll find your bust size regardless of what it is. Cashmerette has a very good size calculator on their website, but beware that if you, like me, have very small hips in comparison to the rest of your measurements, it can lead you astray sometimes.
As a disclaimer, I am a Cashmerette Club collaborator. I received a year of All Access club membership in exchange for trying this pattern, along with two others. That said, they did not ask me to say anything, or post anything. Everything I have to say about this pattern is my opinion and my opinion alone.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about my Mansfield dress.
My first design choice was to decide on the bodice-skirt mix. I didn’t want to make the sheer dress, just one single dress. I prefer a flared dress, that is, dresses with A-line or fuller skirts, so I settled on the bodice from the Mansfield and the gored knee-length skirt from the Upton dress. In terms of styling for my body, this turned out to be a great option.
Then the real work of fitting this pattern to fit me started. And it was a lot!
I first muslined the size 18 bodice, grading out to the 20 at the waist. But this was massive on me. I ended up using the size 16 E/F cup through the bust, then grading out to the 18 at the waist. But I can actually go down a size throughout and it would fix some issues I still had even after all the fitting I did. After constructing the bodice, but before adding the invisible zipper, I had to remove some fabric from the center back, starting with half an inch at the top, and tapering down to nothing at the waist.
The Mansfield pattern has the zipper at the side, but I moved it to the back. That means I had to split the center back piece down the middle and add seam allowance there. You don’t have to do this, but you will need to choose where you want your zipper and adjust either the bodice or the skirt if you are mixing it up with the Upton because they are drafted with the zipper in different places.
When I made the muslin, the back was far too low for me and I could see a lot of my bra. To fix this, I raised the back 1”, which, in retrospect, should have been more. I feel like the low back as drafted is not very friendly to people with big boobs who have to wear bras. Maybe this is a me-problem, who knows. But even after raising the back, my bra still shows. In actual wearing, I had to use double-sided fashion tape to keep it all in place.
This issue may also be partly there because I do think the straps are set too wide for my body, at least in the sizes I chose, which are my sizes. Sizing down would fix this a bit, but I am not sure how much.
The straps, in addition to being too wide for me, were also too long. I shortened them and changed the slope of the shoulder seam to fit the slope of my shoulder. They could still be a bit shorter, which would also help with the too-low back.
I also had issues with gaping at the back armhole, which I fixed by creating a hinge in the pattern piece and pivoting the excess fabric to the back waist dart. I fixed the gaping neckline by doing the same, but at the front.
As always, I had to shorten the bodice. In this case, I shortened it 3/8” between the bust darts and the armscye. This also worked to raise the bust point, which was too low on me as drafted.
That’s actually quite a bit of fit adjustments, but for a great fit, you really have to put in the work. My fit here isn’t quite great, as I’ve already explained, but I feel like I did a great job for the first iteration of the dress. There will be more, because making adjustments the second time is easier with all the knowledge gained from the first try. Cashmerette classifies this pattern for advanced beginners, but I’m not sure an advanced beginner has the necessary fitting knowledge to make this pattern work.
And, to be clear, most patterns need fit adjustments. Just like clothes don’t usually fit great off the rack, patterns don’t fit all bodies as drafted. So me saying that I needed to make all these changes is not in any way blaming the pattern.
The skirt was the simplest thing about making this dress. It’s straight from the pattern in a size 20, except I didn’t use the waist band that the Upton provides.
The fabric is one of the best things about this dress though, I think. The main fabric is a polyester Mikado, kind of like polyester satin, but not quite, from Mood Fabrics in the NYC Garment District. It was a bit pricey, at $35 a yard, but worth it for a holiday party or other special occasion dress.
The skirt is unlined and I lined the bodice with a thin rayon bemberg lining, also from Mood.
Truth be told, I initially wanted to make this in a silky jacquard, but I couldn’t find anything I liked that was also in my price range. For a summer day dress, the Mansfield would be great in a silk-cotton blend with some heft, or maybe non-stretch cotton sateen. I don’t think that lightweight fabrics would work though.
If you are looking for a really versatile dress pattern that can be dressed up, dressed down, mixed and matched, give you different styles, and you fall within Cashmerette’s size range, then I really think that the Mansfield, along with the Upton, should be your next purchase. This pattern bundle makes the possibilities
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