I maxed out my vacation time again so I took Friday off to sew. I didn't manage to get the dress done but stubbornly pinned myself into it and wore it to the Troubadours concert, anyway. It was dark. Nobody could see that I didn't have buttons.
I finished the buttons the next day:
The lining makes it heavy but I sort of like the semi-19th century feel:
I ran out of time to mess with the skirt so this is the gathered (well, pleated) quarter-circle skirt with which I was experimenting in small scale. It worked great--lots of sweep and the look of a dirndl but with less bulk around the waist, but freer around the hips and in need of less fitting than a semi-circle without a gathered waist.
The bodice isn't meant to be tightly fitted but it does have a little bit of, for lack of a better term, side-boob going on. It sags a little around the dart (not along the dart, though; the dart isn't the issue). It's OK in this dress but I wouldn't make it again without trying to fix it.
I made another copy of the bodice front and slashed it from the center front waist diagonally to the side armscye, then perpendicularly downward from the middle of that slash to the side waist, and then rotated the diagonal quadrants inward a little (1/2 inch overlap = 1 inch taken out of the side-front).
A picture is worth a thousand words, right?
This takes up that part of the bodice around the dart but leaves the waist, side, center front opening, and upper seam/yoke measurements the same. The dart is a little smaller.
Comparison of the new (orange) and previous (green) bodice pieces ignore the jar; it was holding the paper down):
I ran up an embarrassingly sloppy test out of a rotted bedsheet. I'm going to try out a (wearable, I hope) muslin later. I think this gives it enough of a "tummy tuck", though, without spoiling the softness of the gathers into the yoke.
I finished the buttons the next day:
The lining makes it heavy but I sort of like the semi-19th century feel:
I ran out of time to mess with the skirt so this is the gathered (well, pleated) quarter-circle skirt with which I was experimenting in small scale. It worked great--lots of sweep and the look of a dirndl but with less bulk around the waist, but freer around the hips and in need of less fitting than a semi-circle without a gathered waist.
The bodice isn't meant to be tightly fitted but it does have a little bit of, for lack of a better term, side-boob going on. It sags a little around the dart (not along the dart, though; the dart isn't the issue). It's OK in this dress but I wouldn't make it again without trying to fix it.
I made another copy of the bodice front and slashed it from the center front waist diagonally to the side armscye, then perpendicularly downward from the middle of that slash to the side waist, and then rotated the diagonal quadrants inward a little (1/2 inch overlap = 1 inch taken out of the side-front).
A picture is worth a thousand words, right?
This takes up that part of the bodice around the dart but leaves the waist, side, center front opening, and upper seam/yoke measurements the same. The dart is a little smaller.
Comparison of the new (orange) and previous (green) bodice pieces ignore the jar; it was holding the paper down):
I ran up an embarrassingly sloppy test out of a rotted bedsheet. I'm going to try out a (wearable, I hope) muslin later. I think this gives it enough of a "tummy tuck", though, without spoiling the softness of the gathers into the yoke.
Comments