The Style Arc Adeline dress was such a success for me that I made a third – except this time it was for my Mum.

Okay, it would have been better if I’d ironed it before she tried it on – it was a Christmas present so was all nicely folded up in a pretty gift bag! Anyway, she likes it!

Mum and I have some distinct figure similarities, which is hardly surprising considering I share half her genetic material!  It means that dresses that work well on my shape often work well on Mum’s shape too.  She was always a couple of inches taller than me, but is now about my height. I left this dress the pattern length (I shortened my second version) as Mum prefers to have her dresses longer rather than shorter.

It’s a straight size 16 for Mum – mine is a size 12. Mum and I share the same thick waist, round belly, relatively slim hips and flat bum. She is more blessed in the boob department than I am,  but we both have similarly rounded upper backs. Interestingly, despite the similarities in our body shapes, our head size, hair colour and type and facial features are completely different – I look like Dad, and my brother looks incredibly like Mum, who looks incredibly like her father. Interestingly to me, when I visited Germany twenty odd years ago, I was shocked at how much I looked like many of the population. I have a German great-grandfather, and it seems that those genes are the ones that have been expressed more in my facial features than the Scottish and English genes that make up the rest of me (many, many generations back). Ah genetics – they’re fascinating! My husband’s parents are Dutch (as are all preceding generations of his family) and I find it interesting to watch my girls grow and develop and see which features they express from each side of the family. I don’t think that biology is destiny or that it’s nature before nurture, but those chromosomes do mix things up!

So, back to the dress. As it’s the third time I’ve sewn this, it was pretty quick and straightforward. The fabric is a olive green cotton pinstriped in black, so I used black thread for the topstitching as well. The fabric is from deep stash but I think it was initially on the Darn Cheap Fabrics $2 table.

Do you like how I ran the stripes on the pockets horizontally rather than vertically? That was really to avoid attempting to match the stripes, but I think it’s a nice detail!

I think that this dress is definitely a success on Mum. You can see my earlier versions here, Meg’s here, Jean’s here, Meg’s here (in a superb colour) and Anna’s here. It’s a great style on anyone who isn’t especially interested in waist definition.  Long live the cocoon dress!