Welcome to Day 2 of hacking the Amelia pattern. If you missed Day 1 when we raised the back neckline, you can check it out here. 

Today, we will discuss those dreaded gathers and a few ways I've skipped them. The Amelia has gathers in three different places on the adult pattern:

• Under the bust
• On the waistband
• On the skirt

For this tutorial, we will be skipping the last two gathers. 

Goodbye Waistband Gathers 

When sewing Amelia per the instructions, you cut QTY 2 of both the Waistband and Waistband Lining. Then, you gather the height of the waistband until it matches the height of the lining. So, let's create a flat waistband without the gathers by cutting QTY 4 of the Waistband Lining. QTY 2 will be for the lining and QTY 2 will be for the outer dress instead of the Waistband pattern piece.



Looking back to the instructions, you can now skip the gathering bit for the waistband. Continue construction as directed in the pattern.

Goodbye Skirt Gathers

Now, for my favorite hack to any pattern - adding a circle skirt. This is guaranteed to make me feel like a million bucks. I don’t know what it is about a circle skirt, it is just heaven in a garment to me.

For this one, all I did was compare the width of the Amelia waistband lining pattern piece to the bottom of my Sahara bodice. They were the same, so I knew I could just pop the Sahara skirt onto my Amelia bodice

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Don’t own the Sahara or have a printed copy in your size accessible? No worries, we can use a calculation to get there. Don't love math? Me neither. Check out this simple calculator from By Hand London. 

Voila

We did it! Time to take that dress out for a spin.