I have been wanting to do this ever since I released the
Southport Dress and am so glad that I finally carved out the time to make this happen. I wore it to a picnic this week for my husband's work and I felt so comfortable and confident. I want to make another one in black already.
It was a bit of trial and error type of process making this so I don't have a full tutorial for you yet. My goal is to make another one soon and photograph the steps now that I know what I am doing, but I will tell you in the this post what I did in case you feel ready to go ahead and make one up yourself.
I made the top portion of the jumpsuit according to the top portion of the
Southport Dress with a few changes. You want to add a few inches to the bottom, much like I did in
this tutorial where I turned it into a tank top. You will also need to adjust the width of the bottom so that it's the same width as the waistband of your
Hudson pants. Sew the top portion up according to the directions, except wait to put on the buttons and buttonholes until after you make the rest of your jumpsuit. This is because you may shorten the top more and you want the buttons to be in the correct positions.
When making the bottom portion of your jumpsuit, cut it out according to my instructions for
Woven Hudson Pants which you can find
here but with a few changes. You are going to want to raise the crotch length at the top of your pants on both the front and the back so that the waist hits nearer to the natural waistline instead of the hips. After trying on some of my
Hudson Pants I decided that adding an inch the front and back rise was good for me. The other change that you are going to make is to add 3/4" to the height of the waistband. Once folded in half this will be 3/8" on the top of the waistband that will serve as the seam allowance to sew the blouse to the bottoms. Sew the pants up according to the instructions except when doing the waistband, sew a row of stitching 3/8" from the top folded edge before attaching the waistband to the pants and inserting the elastic.
Once you have your bottoms and top completed separately, try them on together, tucking the top into the bottoms and pinning in place. When you have it fitting like you want, mark where you have the top pinned plus 3/8" for seam allowance. Cut off any excess and sew the top and bottom together. Now sew on your buttons and buttonholes.
Like I said, I hope to do a more thorough tutorial soon, but if you have any questions please ask and I will try to clarify as much as I can.
The fabric used in this version is some
rayon challis from JoAnns which was great to work with. I made a couple mistakes when cutting out so I wasn't able to pattern match as much as I hoped, but in the end I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out.
