Retro-Style Shirt-Collar Dress Pattern Design for Little Girls

Have you ever wished you had a Retro-Style Shirt-Collar Dress Pattern for your little girl? Our tutorial shows you how to remodel a basic pattern into a lay-open pointed collar pattern.

My niece visited this winter, bringing her sweet little girls with her. She sews the cutest dresses for them. On one of the dresses, she remodeled a regular blouse pattern without a collar, into an open neck, pointy collared dress. It was darling, and so retro looking.

She had some questions, because apparently you can’t buy that sort of dress pattern for little girls right now. And above all, when you have a basic pattern that fits, you don’t really want to try a completely new pattern. It’s hard to fit basic purchased patterns to real little girls.

After talking about ways to remodel a basic pattern, I thought perhaps there’d be other moms who wanted to change their little girls’ basic pattern.

I dug into my old patterns from the days when I sewed for my little Kimmie… and found this cute retro pattern from my MIL. I thought it looked like the perfect pattern to try this design hack.

For more sewing design tips
check out this post or this one.
For striped fabric, check this post.

How To Redesign a Basic Round-Neck Bodice Pattern into a Retro-Style Shirt-Collar Dress

Here’s our step-by-step pattern to transform a regular front bodice without a collar into a front bodice with a retro-style collar that stands open like a shirt collar:

Supplies Needed:

Regular round-neck pattern: front and back bodice with set-in sleeves, either with an added skirt or shift dress pattern
Pattern design paper such as this marked by the inch paper or this sewable and drapable Swedish paper.
Scissors
Pins
Measuring tape and/or ruler
Pen/pencil

Step 1:
Redesign the basic blouse front pattern

The basic blouse front is all you need to change for this pattern design DIY.
Add a 5/8″ seam down the center front. My retro pattern already has a seam, as it’s got buttons down the center front. We won’t make this one with buttons, though. Instead, we’ll sew down the center front into a typical 5/8″ seam. Mark the center front at the neck with a dot. Mark the neck seam and the center front bodice seam with a dotted line. Cut out the pattern.

Step 2:
Design the shirt-style collar

Align the front and back bodice pattern pieces at the shoulder seams.
Pin the two pieces together on the seam line.
To make the collar pattern, begin to measure the neck at the seam line at the center back
Bring the tape measure around the neckline, staying on the seam line, to the center front. Add the seam, also. This number is the length of the collar. Decide how wide you want the collar to be from the neckline in the front. Double this number.
Mark a rectangle the length of number 4 by double the desired width of the collar. We cut ours 14″ x 6″.
Fold the rectangle in half by length, then by width. Mark a curve from the front of the collar to the center back, causing the back of the collar to be about 1/2″ narrower than at the front center. Mark the center front neck seam with a dot. This will line up with number 3 of Step 1.
My retro pattern has neck facings. If your pattern doesn’t have facings, use the neckline of the Front and Back Bodice pieces. Trace around the neckline, straight down the center back and all around to the shoulder seam, measuring 2.5″ from the neckline. Do this with the front also, except extend the center front facing down about 4″ along the center front seam. This will allow the collar to lay open, which you’ll see in the “Sewing The Lay-Open Collar” dress tutorial coming soon. Our pattern shows the center front facing all the way to the waist, but we’ll cut it shorter when we sew the dress.