I have bought some super-soft heavy knit fabric to make a dress; I'd like a shawl or wide turtle-neck one, long tunic style or similarly simple, but the pattern sites are not helpful, and even though I specify women pattern in the search, I get lots of unrelated patterns. Annoying.

Did you try here? Someone shared it a while ago (You? I can't remember!) and it looked great Dress Patterns - Mood Sewciety

It wasn't me! I'll take a look, thanks! (And the problem with the search is they use an "or" on all words, rather than an "and", so the more precise you want to be, the more results you get. Doing a search on a single word then filtering it down gets better results. Annoying.)