I bet you thought I'd given up on Simplicity 4727, the Fourth of July Dress, since it's now way past the Fourth of July and I hadn't posted anything about it. Well, I hadn't. A year or two ago I would have, and stuffed it into the Scrap Box of Shame, never to be mentioned again.
To pick up where I left off . . . I'd spent a lot of time tweaking the skirt since the lower body tends to give me more fit issues than does the upper body (or so I thought; this pattern may have changed my mind about this), and got it mostly assembled, only to discover that the bodice was . . . I think I described it on We Sew Retro as "designed by a muskrat with a drinking problem".
It looked like this:
I don't think I even knew a dress could be too big in the arm-pits.
I got the pattern out again on Saturday, when I had plenty of time to devote to cutting it up and taping it back together, and started again.
The short version is that I:
1) Took one inch out of the underarm on each side.
2) Took one inch out of the center front and center back.
3) Shortened the straps by one-half inch in both front and back (one inch overall).
The fit was better but was still snug so I:
1) Added the inch back into the front and back center.
The second muslin was lumpy and weird so I:
1) Took the inch back out of the center front and took a half-inch out of the center back.
2) Did a full-bust adjustment. This is how I know that Hell has frozen over, because I'm not full-busted.
The third muslin was better still but still had some issues so I:
1) Lengthened the bust and waist darts.
2) The shoulder strap bucked at the back so I slashed it and rotated the strap outward/downward about half an inch.
The fourth muslin is too short, which is easily remedied, and still needs the bust darts lowered about 3/4 of an inch, but it's pretty good. All I have is this terrible picture:
The patterns look like this now:
And they have basically no relation whatsoever to the pattern pieces with which I started (which had already been sized down!). This was the bodice front even before I did the worst of the cutting up:
Comments