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Floral 128 Russian Settlers' Dress with Ribboned Back

June 25, 2025

One of the reasons I like the 128 Russian Settlers' Dress so much is the simple options for finishing the dress that can give it so many different looks. I explored the pleated back option on a heavier weight Guatemalan cotton dress with my last dress, and this week I wanted to try the simpler gathered back with the classic 1/4" ribbon.

I started with a floral cotton lawn that is lightweight and perfect for this dress. This fabric has been in my personal stash for a long time and I do not know where I got it, but it has a similar Liberty of London Tana lawn look so I loved it. By the way, we have some gorgeous Liberty Tana Lawns in our shop now that would also be perfect for this dress!

One small issue with my fabric was that it was actually quite narrow. The pattern needs fabric that is at least 40" wide to fit the entire front/back pattern piece. And my fabric was closer to 34" wide. Which meant that the front/back did not fit. This is an easy problem to solve with this pattern however, and I just folded out about 3 inches in the center of the pattern (vertically) to fit the pattern piece on the fabric. I used the whole width of the fabric.

white pattern piece on top of a floral fabric

Now, this technique can be used with whatever width fabric you have. If you have a narrower width fabric than the pattern, you can fold the pattern to fit your fabric width. I like the idea of folding the pattern and "truing" the top edge of the front (the sloped part) rather than folding the side down (because you may loose some or all of the slope at the front or side). You could fold the center front/back to the width of the fabric, but I liked folding the middle of the pattern piece. Similarly, with a wider fabric, you can move the pattern piece so that the side edge is aligned with the selvage and cut the pattern wider than it indicates, and opening the pattern down the center so that it uses the whole width of the fabric. This is easy, especially when you are going to be gathering (rather than pleating) your dress. And you can take advange of the whole width of your fabric.

Because my dress bascially lost 12 inches of fabric width due to the narrow fabric (6 inches from the front and back since the pattern was cut on the fold), I ended up with a narrower version than the original patterns indicates. This was fine for me, but if I had wanted more width or room in the dress, I could have cut another back for a fuller back and a wider dress altogether.

If you haven't read about sizing this dress up from the original, it is VERY easy to do and the idea of having as much (or as little) fabric width in this dress is very simple. Read about how to change the sizing of this dress in our blog post here.

I put in gathering stitches at the top of the front and back of the dress and on the back of the dress I added 6 more rows of gathering stitches. I marked the first row of the 3 sets of stitching with a washable marker and used a measuring tape to make sure I was getting the markings in the correct place on the dress back.

Marking the floral fabric with a green marker

I pinned and sewed the ribbon over the gathered stitches. This was a very simple technique and was a lot of fun (and so easy) to make. And it looks very pretty, and more complicated that it was. It almost has a "smocked" look to it.

gathered floral fabric with three pink ribbons pinned to it

I got the band and straps added and then I hemmed the dress. I had just enough ribbon to add one more row around the bottom of the dress right where the hem was. This was a perfect way of covering the hem stitching and compliments the ribbon on the back of the dress.