Operation Xmas Dress Part 4 - The Real Deal

Yessss, it's finally time for the "sexy dress reveal" post.  Learning about fitting is all well and good, but it can't compare to finished garment eye candy. Warning, this post is overly photo heavy, cause reasons. Now let's get to it, shall we?

My first fabric choice for McCall's 9572 was green velvet, not crushed or panne, but regular velvet. However my internet searches did not turn up much in the way of regular velvet.  The only site that had something similar to what I was looking for was Michael Levine. Their emerald green velvet was lovely, but at 30 bucks a yard for 45" wide fabric, it was too rich for my budget. I consoled myself that sewing bias seams in velvet isn't something you want to do on a deadline.  Probably one of the smarter decisions of my life.

So right about the time I was admitting to myself that velvet wasn't going to happen, Sunni posted about wool crepe over on her blog. Ahhh wool crepe. Now that's a fabric that would drape well on the bias and wouldn't be a bear to sew.  I checked out what colors Sunni had in stock and low and behold she had the perfect color of hunter green.  The color pretty much sold me and 4 yards were soon on their way to me. People this color is GORGEOUS!  My camera can not fully capture the lovely depth it has. Wish I could mail you all swatches or something so that you could behold it with your own eyes. Mmmmm fabric crush.  

As you would expect, the wool crepe sewed up like a dream.  I did line the bodice portion of the dress since wool feels a little itchy when it is next to my skin. My "chiffon" petticoat took care of shielding my legs from the bottom half of the dress.

This pattern has cut on facings that are folded over and catch stitched to the seams. The directions suggested finishing the edges with bias binding and calling the insides done.  Personally this made me nervous since the entire neckline is on the bias. For my own peace of mind I fused the facing part of the bodice and then sewed twill tape right next to the area where the facings fold over.  Then I drafted a lining pattern by tracing the bodice pieces and removing most of the facings, leaving only a 5/8" seam allowance to attach it.

Some polyester leopard lining was chosen from the stash and I then found out why this pattern didn't tell you to line the bodice.  Ummm yeah, sewing 4 right angles is a complete pain in the ass. There was much ripping, clipping and cursing at past Heather. What the hell had she been thinking?  Only by some miracle did I get that lining in without major puckering at every point. Maybe the sewing goddess likes Christmas cookies.

The dress has a side zip for getting in and out of it.  I was going to do a regular invisible zip because me and invisible zips are best buds. My local JoAnn's had other plans for me since the only green invisible zip color they had in stock was olive green.  You had one job JoAnn's! Instead I had to buy a regular zip and hand pick it. BLARG. 

It did not go well...at all. Just getting the one side of the zipper in took me half a day.  Then I thought the zipper was done, unpicked it, and found that I hadn't hand stitched close enough to the tape and the entire seam allowance was free. GAHHHH!  So let's just all admit that we have different talents and hand picked zippers isn't mine.  However if you need an invisible zip sewn in with a perfect join in about 20 minutes then I'm the girl to call.

The rest of the insides are sergred and I finished the skirt with a small rolled hem as called for in the instructions.  Thank god for audio books to distract you from endless hems.

The final step for my Christmas dress was to make a self covered belt.  I lucked out and found a lady on Etsy who was destashing all of her of vintage belt kits. They were all added to my stash. Muhaaaa Mine!

This was my first time making a belt and it turned out OK for a beginner.  Wool crepe isn't the best fabric to start with since it does like to ravel. At least the worst looking ravely bits are all on the back side and can't be seen when the belt is worn. Putting, "more self covered belts" on the to do list for this year, so that I can get better at the skill.

Ahhh, so those are all the details on the Christmas Dress.  I was super pleased with how the whole thing turned out.  The dress was very comfortable to wear and I loved how the hunter green color looked with the red accessories.  It all went together just perfectly and I had that mental glow of a big project that turned out well.  

Thanks for sticking with me through this series that took longer than planned.  Now we can look forward to 2015 sewing. Hooray!

(Throwing in this less than great picture in because you should have at least one picture with a Christmas tree in the back. Look red petticoat!)

Operation Xmas Dress Part 3 - Fitting Adjustments

At long last another post in the Christmas dress series. In the last segment I'd futzed around with grading until the pattern fit my general dimensions. Today I'm going to talk about the fitting adjustments that were made to fit the pattern to my figure.

After trying on muslin #2 I had the following concerns - the dart had been dropped too low, the front neckline still felt a bit big, and there seemed to be too much extra length in the shoulder area. I also had figure out what skirt length to use.

In the end I made a ton of bodice muslins and quit at the point were my patience ran out.  You'll only see the final muslin since people under deadlines can't wait to favorable photo days. (There wasn't much difference between them anyway.)

Break down of all the final fitting adjustments. 
1. Raised the bust dart 1/2".
I'd previously dropped it 1.5 inches from the original position, so final dart location is 1" lower than the original.

2. Put a 3/4" hollow chest adjustment in front neckline.
In muslin #2 I felt neckline was still exposing a lot of my shoulder.  I'd picked a dress with sleeves so that I didn't have to mess around with special undergarments, but the neckline was exposing the whole bra strap.  Adding a hollow chest adjustment helped bring the neckline closer into the neck, giving me more bra coverage.  I didn't need to adjust the back neckline in anyway, probably because my forward shoulders need extra length in that area.

3. Removed 3/8" of grading in the shoulder area only. This change was made to both the front and back bodice.
McCall's 9572 has an elbow dart and it wasn't in the correct position. With the added grading the shoulder area felt a bit too big, even though the waist was perfect.  This makes sense because my shoulder/bust area is a size smaller than my waist/hip area.  Lucky for me a solution wasn't hard to figure out.
I'd put one of the grading lines right next to the side seam and decided it to use the underarm notch as a separation point.  I cut the notch deeper so that it connected with the grading line, breaking it into two parts. Then I removed 3/8" by moving upper part of the graded area back together. This operation left a small bump out under the notch area. To "true" the area I redrew the underarm curve.  Here's a picture of that adjustment before add the sloping shoulder adjustment mentioned in step 5.

4. Raised the kimono sleeve curve 1/2".
The ease in the upper part of the kimono sleeve was a bit too much for my modern tastes.  I decided to reduce that area by raising the curve of the kimono sleeve and narrowing the upper part of the arm. To do this I redrew the curve 1/2" higher than the original position and blended the underarm seam into the elbow area. (Didn't take a picture of this before cutting off the excess. Oops.)

5. Made a 1/2" sloping shoulder adjustment to sleeves.
After mocking up some of these changes I was still getting a horizontal fold across the back at the sleeve area.  (Super crappy photo below so you can get a general idea what I'm talking about.)

 Instagram was polled about this problem since I had no idea what was up. The general consensus was that it was excess fabric from my sloping shoulders.  I made a 1/2" adjustment for this using the "Fit for Real People" technique pictured below.

I'm only half convinced it made a real difference to the fit. Seems I need to work on more kimono sleeve fitting.

6. Shortened bodice by 1/4".
Took a scant quarter inch off that the bottom of the bodice. This length probably could have been left on because I ended up lining the bodice.

7. Shortened skirt by ????
OK I do know how much I shortened the skirt, it's just different in this muslin than it is in the final dress.  The muslin was shortened by 6" which turned out to be too short with the bias sucking back up.  On the final dress I shortened the skirt by 2".

Here's what all those adjustments look made up in the final muslin.

Front

Side

Back

There's still some wrinkling going on under the arm on the back. I may need a larger sloping shoulder adjustment then a 1/2".  On the other hand kimono sleeves without gussets are going to have more ease which equal wrinkles.  It's something I could have worked on some more, but decided that it wasn't worth the effort. Girl can't wear a muslin to her in-laws house on Christmas day.

Part 4 "The final dress" post will arrive when ever I get a photo opportunity. So far non rainy days have been few and far between and usually happen when I'm the sole parent around. Let's hope the next one collides with some toddler free time and maybe semi-warm temps.

Operation Xmas Dress Part 2 - Grading

When last we "talked" I'd stumbled across the perfect vintage pattern for my Xmas dress only to find it was several sizes too small. It's times like these that I wish that my genetic stock was a little more "willowy" than "sturdy."  But what are you gonna do, not eat cake? Perish the thought!

Anyway the obvious solution was to grade the pattern, but I balked at this at first.  To be honest grading is one of those things that I don't really understand  Once you get beyond, "increasing the size of the pattern by increments" my brain just zones out thinking about when it can eat cookies. Cookies are much more interesting than mathematical problems.  This is why I have to bribe my brain with cookies to do mathematical problems.  

In the end I decided to buy the pattern and give grading a shot for two reasons.  The first was that I'd done a 4" grade on the Brasilia dress and that turned out fine.  Secondly McCall's 9572 is a fairly simple garment and there weren't more than 4 pieces to worry about. Surely even a grading nob can manage 4 pieces. At least that's what I told myself while pressing purchase.

So hopes were running high when my pattern arrived and I gleefully traced out the bodice pieces. It was then that it struck me, A - the bodice is on the bias and B - now which way do I grade this? There was also the added question of what to do with the kimono sleeve.  How much grading did it need and were would one put that grading? I decided to just grade the bust and waist area and hope that kimono sleeve was wide enough without changes.

After staring at the pattern piece a bit, I decided to put the grading parallel to the CF. Spoiler - This Was Incorrect.  But hey I do stupid things so you can learn from my mistakes. Yeah that's it. 

Here's my pattern piece with the grading lines running through the neckline. You'll see why this was a bad idea in a minute.  But first let's talk about a 4" grade for those that may know nothing about this.  

OK, so my pattern needs 4" of width added to it. I want to take the total amount of extra ease needed and divide it by 4, because each pattern piece is a quarter of the total width of the garment. Luckily for me this is elementary math and even my brain can spit out "add one 1 inch to pattern" without strain.   To add the inch to the pattern, 3 lines are drawn on as cutting guide lines. The pattern is cut apart on these line and then taped back together with the extra ease added between them. The inch is broken down to 3/8" added to the outer line, 1/2" to the middle line and 3/8" to the other outer line. This process is repeated on the back and in the end you have 4 extra inches added to the pattern.  And that my friends is minimum explanation of a 4" grade.

Now I have blurry muslin pics. Hooray? Here's muslin #1 with a petticoat underneath.

OK, so the reason you don't want to add an inch to your neckline is that you get a gappy neckline. No shit, Sherlock.  But as you can see this didn't occur to me until after I'd gone and done it.  Other fitting issues I noticed were that the skirt is too long for my 5' 6" height, the bust dart is in the wrong place and the cuff area of the kimono sleeve is too tight.  On the plus side the waist area fit perfectly and I could see the torso length was almost right.  

With all that information it was time to go back to the drawing board and regrade my bodice. This time I put the grading lines parallel with the grain line.  On the back I had to skew them off grain slightly to get 3 to fit into the waist area.

I also dropped the bust dart 1.5" and added just a bit more width down at the cuff of the kimono sleeve.

With those changes I decided to sew muslin #2 to make sure my grading change was successful. Here's the pictures of that version.

A non gappy neckline is a plus and my waist area is still fitting nicely.  Of course the dress still needs my personal fitting tweaks to look really good and we'll talk about those in part 3. Ooooohhhhh, more muslin photos just waiting in the wings. I bet you can hardly wait.

Operation Xmas Dress, Part 1 - The Pattern

Last December I wanted to make a Christmas dress.  There was no exact pattern in mind, just hazy thoughts of something with a V neck, sleeves and a full skirt.  Oh and it had to be green, soft forest green.  Crazy right? You'd think little miss "red is a neutral" would be all over a bright red dress. Seems my subconscious wanted something a little different.

The dress didn't happen last year because the whole house got some sort of horrible chest cold right at the beginning of December. Merry Christmas! Hope you didn't need that lung. I spent most of December in a zombie state of sickness until finally going to the doctor to beg antibiotics.  (Side Note - Middle aged male doctors who act like you're being dramatic about a "slight chest cold" can suck it.) Annnnyway, once the drugs kicked in there was only time to whip together a quick knit dress for the 25th. Any disappointment I might have felt was negated by finally being able to lay down horizontally without going into a 10 minute coughing spasm. Thank you modern medicine.

I thought the green Christmas dress was one of those passing sewing fancies that would dissipate after the hard deadline had passed. Don't know about you, but that sort of thing happens all the time around here. Must be some weird deadline induced creatively left over from college.  However the green Christmas dress did not go away. It danced around my brain on a regular basis, a riddle that had to be solved.  The basic bones of what I wanted in the garment were still the same, V neck, sleeves, full skirt.  But nailing down an actual pattern continued to be difficult. Several options and hacks were considered, but they all felt wrong. In fact I had that annoying sensation that I'd "know the pattern when I saw it." That's great intuition, but where the heck is a girl supposed to look after tossing the stash and surfing the web?   Then late November I was browsing vintage patterns on Etsy and I SAW IT!

BAM - McCall's 9572. V-neck? Check.  Sleeve? Check. Full Skirt? Check.  Add simple looking to sew, but still elegant. Check, check, CHECK! I was also lucky this pattern wasn't one of those wildly popular vintage designs and thus had the very affordable price tag 15 bucks. Heck I buy new patterns more expensive then that. So everything was coming up Heather except for one slight snag, the pattern wasn't my size.

Yes my sewing friends, this particular pattern was a size 14.  My vintage size hovers in the 18-20 range, depending on the manufacturer. The body measurements for the dress are  Bust - 32, Waist 26.5, Hip - 35, a full 4 inches smaller than any of my measurements. A quick search of the pattern number showed that this was the largest size available for purchase. If I was going to make this dress than I was gonna have to grade it up. So I bought the pattern and graded it up, but that is a story for another day.