If there is one thing I cannot deny, it is that I have soft spot for peter pan collars. Last week I’ve been experimenting a bit, and stitched up a little variation on the peter pan collar.
The collar is made from 3 different pieces, and it disappears into the shoulder seams. If you scroll down, you can find detailed instructions for drawing such a collar.
I was struggling a bit to find a suitable name for this collar. The “three-part semi peter pan collar” is a very accurate, yet rather unattractive name. The “Mary Darling collar” (named after another character from the Peter Pan books) sounds a lot better!
As is always the case with the awesome names I give to my patterns (Matryoshka bin, Hanami dress, com’on?) the idea was not mine at all. It came from Linda, who runs the Berlin-based fabric shop Volksfaden. If you haven’t checked it out before, make sure you do, because this is no ordinary webshop! Volksfaden is just oozing with nostalgia and fun, and makes shopping for fabrics a true visual pleasure. On top of that, Linda carries a wide range of brands and designers, including some of my very favorites (echino, Petit Pan, Lotta Jansdotter, Melody Miller, Soft Cactus, …).
Linda also supplied the gorgeous fabrics I used for this dress. Both are from the new French brand Atelier Brunette. Not only does Atelier Brunette have great color combinations and gorgeous prints, the fabrics are also really finely woven and light (almost like voile) and come at 150 cm (55″) width. I’m a huge fan!
Would you like some free Atelier Brunette fabrics? Perhaps you can buy them with the €50 Volksfaden voucher Linda is generously raffling off. Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter. And yes, the GA is open internationally (I know a few US readers who would love to get their hands on some Aterlier Brunette ;-)). Fifty euros is currently worth about $65 – that’s a pretty sweet prize, isn’t it?
Good luck!
THE TUTORIAL
In the tutorial below, I explain how you can draw and make a Mary Darling collar, to fit any regular bodice pattern. It is really easy!
A. Making the pattern
1. Take your bodice front pattern, and trace the seam allowance of the neck line and shoulders.
Are you using a pattern which does not include seam allowances? Then simply add SA at neck line and shoulders.
2. Next, mark where you would like the collar pieces to meet each other.
3. Decide on the desired width of the collar pieces. Mark this width as illustrated below.
I went for a slim collar: just 1 inch (2,5 cm), but you can make it as wide as you like. You don’t have to include seam allowance yet.
4. Next, draw the collar pieces as illustrated below. Try to make the curves more or less symmetrical.
5. Then, take a piece of tracing paper, and trace both collar pieces as illustrated below.
Make sure to trace them separately, so that you have space to add seam allowance in step 6.
