Hi there!
Here's my summer
dress, what was supposed to be a quick palette-cleanser after my
latest unselfish sew. However, as my choices for palette-cleansers
seem to often do, this ended up taking a lot longer than expected,
and wasn't quite the easy win I hoped it would be- hence the
'chequered success', which is also a reference to messy print matching with the gingham.
I don't know about
you, but I love sewing books. I've received quite a few over the last
couple of years since sewing has become a major part of my lifestyle-
I have the benefit/ curse of having a birthday quite close to
Christmas which means I tend to receive a stack of them, get
inspiration overload in January, but then find it hard to commit to
one and get on with things. The Colette Sewing Handbook is one such
gift, received about two years ago, and while I have read all the
information and found it quite soothing as well as instructive, the
patterns are of course five years old now and while lovely they do
speak to the reinterpreted vintage style of a few years back which is
a bit 'cutesy indie girl' for me now (although if I'd been sewing at
that time past me would have loved it!). However, I'm still quite
keen to try all the patterns, which have good bones and with style
variations of my own can be made to be more 'me'.
For some reason I'd
been thinking about the Pastille dress a lot; I couldn't decide
whether I loved it or whether it was really frumpy. I was also quite
keen to get on board with the whole 'sewing patterns that teach'
philosophy that Colette has. The neckline bow was a definite no, and
I was torn on the skirt's horizontal pleats. Not really me, but a new
technique to try, and I kind of wanted to do them just as a lesson. I
also switched up the lapped zip for an invisible, as now I have the
right foot these are much easier to insert and give a cleaner look.
Thanks to a warning
from fellow blogger Lynne at Ozzy Blackbeard I decided to make a
muslin to check for the dreaded gapy back that this pattern
apparently inflicts on a few people. I took a different approach to
this pattern than normal- instead of doing an FBA I cheated and
graded between a 10 for the bust and 8 at the waist, back to 10 again
at the hips. This seemed to work pretty well for the front bodice
even if it was a bit fudged. For the back (again graded between 8 and
10, but perhaps I could have left it at 8 all over) I found I had to
close and exclude the neckline darts and make the waistline darts
longer on the back bodice pieces for a better fit. The skirt pieces
on my muslin looked hilariously exaggerated where I'd graded between
waist and hips- almost like the Elisalex which wasn't really what I
was going for. As I wasn't 100% sold on the horizontal pleats at the
bottom of the skirt I had the brainwave of subbing in the skirt from
Simplicity 3257, a vintage skirt that was one of the first patterns I
ever bought.
Luckily the front
pleats of the skirt matched up almost perfectly with the Pastille's
bodice darts, although I did decide to use the Pastille's back skirt
pieces as 3257 has an interesting back vent construction that
involves a large fold of fabric that goes all the way to the
waistband that I thought would be too bulky and would interfere with
the centre back zip. I also had redraft the Pastille back skirt
pieces slightly to match 3257's length and side seams (although I
added 1/4” more ease on each seam up to the hip on the 3257 just
eyeballing as I cut as my last version is a tiny bit tight).
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So far, so good. It all came together pretty nicely, even if I had to find a way to (somewhat) neatly finish my slit at the back of the skirt on the fly as I realised it would be difficult to walk otherwise. My armhole facings are less than perfect- I've got a slightly weird shaping at the top of the cap sleeve where I must have curved inwards slightly when cutting out on the fold, meaning it isn't a nice straight edge at the top, and there is a little bit of gaping at the side seams under the arms that I would address next time.
My main issue with
this dress is that, although the fabric I chose suits the style and
gives the dress a flirty and casual air (in a different fabric it
could look quite elegant and formal- and I'm tempted to give it a
whirl again for sure) I managed to make a hash of cutting and as a
result the check matching on this gingham is a total mess. The worst
is at the waistline, where it seems that both the bodice and the
skirt were cut at a slant, creating a little chequered wedge. The
checks are also quite visibly running off the edge of the hem- and I
just did the best I could with the back as how the bodice and new
skirt back seams were going to match up was total guesswork. At least
I kept the vertical stripes consistent for the most part...
It's frustrating as
in a different fabric this dress would be a total win- I really like
the combination of bodice and skirt and it fits pretty well, and
after working through my adjustments would be a pretty quick sew for
next time. It's just my lack of accuracy in cutting some of the
pieces and, although I feel like I agonised over pattern-matching the
gingham when cutting out it somehow seems to have gone awry. I don't
know if this fabric is off-grain (which is possible, it was something
like £3 a metre and has been sitting in my drawer for a couple of
years) or whether there was some slippage in cutting, but it's
galling.
I'm chalking this
dress up as a 'curate's egg' which is an old phrase I've only
recently discovered via my boyfriend, who came across it in his job
as a sub editor (here are some bonus snaps of us being the homespun couple - he's wearing the GBSB shirt I made him last year). Apparently it means something that has both good and
bad parts; it comes from an old Punch cartoon satirising manners
where a curate who has been given a rotten egg by his host is loathe
to criticise it and cause offence, so claims there are some parts of
it that are still edible. Originally I suppose this phrase would have
had a similar meaning as the less elegant 'you can't polish a turd'
(i.e. someone desperately trying to make a good show of something
patently terrible) but its meaning has morphed over time to take the
kindly curate's balanced view as its driving force. So, this dress
has good bits- but it also has some undeniably bad bits.
If it's not too
cheeky to ask, have any of your projects turned out to be 'curate's
eggs' recently?
Norseotter xx
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