It’s been nearly a year without any blog posts, but, finally, I’m back. With a Bow Patchwork master piece to share!
For some reason, I imagine the words ‘I’m back’ being said dramatically in the voice used in an obscure podcast I sometimes listen to called ‘The Cryptid Factor’. Not because I give a flying fuck about cryptids. Couldn’t care less about the Loch Ness Monster unless she shows up wearing a hand-sewn swimsuit. But I do love listening to the podcast because one of its hosts is Rhys Darby who can make anything funny. Now I’m wondering if any other home sewists ever listen to the Cryptid Factor while sewing. And I’m also imagining a Loch Ness monster in a pink polka dot bikini…
Guess you can tell I’ve been away for a while, I’m getting rather easily distracted in the first paragraphs. At least you can feel secure in your knowledge that there’s no AI involved in the creation of this blog with this kind of randomness…
Now is the part where, after nearly a year of silence, I should explain something about my blog absence. But, not gonna do that, cuz this is a silly amateur home sewing blog and I don’t have to answer for myself when life gets too tough and exhausting to put free content out into the world.
But, rest assured, that even in the absence of much blogging and sharing, I’ve still been sewing. Because sewing remains a refuge for me even in the toughest of times.
And today I have a project to share that I’ve been wanting to make for years, ever since I first saw it. It was love at first sight. A feeling of destiny when I first saw her. A steadfast knowledge that one day she would be mine.
And it’s kind of fitting that after a year of sewing blog absence, I’m returning with a project that feels like something of a pinnacle in my journey as a home sewist.
Details. Creativity. Beauty. Uniqueness.
These are the things home sewing is all about. And the Roberts Wood Bow Patchwork Elysia Dress has it.
From the moment I first saw the Roberts Wood Bow Patchwork Elysia Dress, its romantic, ethereal, woodland-fairy-princess-accidentally-stepped-barefoot-into-the-Met-Gala vibe, gave me all the sewing feels. At 34 POUNDS(!), it’s definitely at the pricey end of the home sewing spectrum. Probably the most expensive sewing pattern I’ve ever purchased. But, in my view, it’s a truly unique and spectacular design and was worth every buck.
I went into this one with very much a “not your everyday sewing project” kind of mentality and it did not dissapoint.
Instead this was, for me, the kind of sewing project that soothed my soul against the raging torment of the world. The planet is burning. Life as we know it is falling apart. Human kindness feels like a distant dream from a bygone era – as quaint as the horse and carriage. But, somehow, the act of attaching one small swatch of fabric to another, as women may have done hundreds of years ago (albeit without the help of a machine), somehow made each new disaster feel slightly more survivable.
In case you can’t tell from all my waxing lyrical about it, I’ve had my eyes on sewing the Bow Patchwork Elyssia Dress for quite a while now.
My biggest barrier was waiting until I found the perfect fabric for it. You need three different fabrics to sew up the dress, with its unique patchwork shape. When I saw this slightly transparent grid-shaped polycotton fabric available in three colours at the Stitch Festival in March 2025, I knew that I’d found the winning threesome! I wouldn’t usually go for a polycotton but given that I’d been keeping an eye out for the perfect fabric for this project for at least a year without success, I decided to stop being a fabric snob, accept that my body was probably already filled with enough micro plastics to kill me anyway, and just make the pretty dress.
The Roberts Wood Bow Patchwork ‘Elysia’ dress is sold in bundles of two sizes. My first word of warning is that the dress as designed is very oversized. My version is size 6-8 (that’s a single size in the nomenclature of the pattern, not two). It is the SMALLEST SIZE AVAILABLE. Obviously, I don’t usually make the smallest size available in anything, so my warning is that this dress is designed to be roomy. Unless I’m missing something, I couldn’t actually find a body measurement guide available, only finished garment measurements. I decided to sew the size 6-8 based on these finished garment measurements which gave me about 10cm ease around my waist.
Sewing Up the Bow Patchwork ‘Elysia’
I went into this project expecting it to be challenging and time consuming. Knowing that I would need to be careful and take my time.
And, I’m pleased to say, that some slow, minute, detailed-oriented sewing was just what I needed. And it really wasn’t challenging or difficult in any way.
The jig-sawing of pieces together, watching pretty colours and shapes appear, in pastel candy shades, just felt so incredibly satisfying. It felt like the sewing equivalent of Alice in Wonderland ballet dancing through a castle made of marshmallow.
The project obviously has a very large number of fabric pieces. I didn’t actually count them because sometimes knowing exactly what we’re dealing with in life can be a bit much. Ignorance is bliss. Yet, it never felt overwhelming. I found the pattern and instructions to be clear and very well organised. The project is also quite intuitive once you get the hang of the pattern pieces and the way they fit together. Following them, I found it surprisingly peaceful to lay out my rows of patches, check them against the instruction book, and then put them together. Then, as rows were attached to rows, and pretty pale pink bows started to form, it felt momentarily as though all was right with the world.
The only thing I messed up was entirely my own fault. I accidentally sewed the two wrong sides of a sleeve together. Instead of joining the underarm seam, I joined the shoulder to the ‘wrist’. The arm is quite unusually shaped and I just got myself a bit confused. And was then surprised when it didn’t fit. As in, couldn’t even go around my upper arm. So I decided to sleep on figuring out how to fix it. Then woke up the next day, realised what I’d done and it was a quick fix. Sometimes you just need to stop and take a breather, right!
Sewing the Patchwork Bow Elysia Dress definitely took a bit longer than an average sewing project, but nowhere near as long as I’d expected. It was pretty easy to just get into the zone and be soothed by the powder puffs of prettiness.
The Roberts Woods Bow Patchwork Elysia dress, in its original form, has a skirt consisting of three tiers of patchworks. There is also a midi-length extension kit available for free which adds an additional tier 4 and tier 5. I intended to make the mid-length extension but didn’t have quite enough fabric in the end. So, to add a little length, my version here has tier 4 from the extension kit added, but not tier 5.
This skirt is definitely VOLUME central! Even without the full midi-length addition. Just in case you were wondering, the simple act of sewing around the hem of this skirt took 28 minutes!!!! And that’s just sewing. Not the additional related prep like overlocking the raw edge and pressing. So the extra layers of the midi extension really are a commitment.
Confession?
When I realised that I didn’t have enough fabric to do the fifth tier, I was secretly grateful because I’m just not sure I could have handled hemming an even more voluminous layer. So this felt like a guilt-free way of being able to call it a day.
And let’s face it, I don’t feel like this is a shortcut dress. I’ve got enough guilt in my life, I’m going to let go of the guilt of not making tier 5.
I’m really rather outrageously happy with how my ‘marshmallows resting on a cloud’ girly dream dress turned out. (And, yes, I’m a 42 year old woman, but fuck that, I’ll wear whatever I want!!)
And while, sure, I haven’t yet had a chance to consider how all this volume goes in the Dutch wind while riding on a bicycle, for now, I’m going to keep idealising my picture perfect pastel dream dress.
As I found the final dress to still be rather roomy, I also made a quick fabric belt to add to it. I think I’ll find myself wearing it both with and without the belt, depending on the mood. Which way to you prefer? Not that the belt is going to save me in the damn wind!
Anyway, this Roberts Wood Bow Dress was kind of a restoring-my-faith-in-life project. As I put the pieces of this dress slowly together, it felt almost as though I was slowly piecing myself back together. Seeing whether I would be able to make something beautiful and new out of all the small individual elements.
Because sewing is always about much more than the fabric and the finished garment, right?
