Hooray Pattern!

After several days of being frustrated with my new fitted dress pattern, and wondering if I wasn't going to be able to get away without a center front seam, I finally buckled down and worked on it yesterday. I put it on, figured out some of the areas that were wrong, took it off and started making some the changes. I was really flying by the seat of my pants, but I determined that the problem was two fold. First, the shoulders at the front needed to be brought up considerably (I cut off about 2" on both sides). This removed the weird pulling I was getting at the top of the bust. The second problem was caused by the side seams being too loose. That, in turn, made their respective curves wrong, which is why my chest was getting squashed in that unpleasant manner.


I'm still getting some wrinkling at the side-most under-breast areas, and there's also a bit at the back. My new seam at the back didn't meet the original in the right spot (highlighted area on the photo). I was extremely happy with it, though. It gives me a nice shape overall, and supports and flattens my bust without smooshing it.

I had Dearg help with with some last minute things before I cut it down. He measured and marked for length and figured out the real curve at the small of the back for me. When I asked him how it looked, he said "Tight". I couldn't have asked for a better answer!

Now that I have the pattern, I can make my next dress- the gray wool sleeveless dress. I plan to do a trapezoidal panel skirt (with a waist seam), and I'm also going to attempt French seams, just because it actually makes the most sense. I'd like to machine sew the panels together, then hand sew the finishing stitches. Hopefully I'll have it ready for Unicorn next weekend.