Happily ever after

Previously on: I was unimpressed with the waist-level bulge on my McCalls 7091 dress. The prime suspect was the significant amount of gathering in the underskirt, but was that the real culprit...?

My first attempt at restructuring this dress was to re-cut the three-panel underskirt into twelve panels the same shape as the panels in the overskirt. I thought that removing the gathering would solve the problem. I did not have much spare pink fabric, so I had to cut the new pieces from the already cut pink skirt. There was insufficient depth so I had to make the tops of each new panel out of the black fabric (this will be important later).

So I sewed and pressed the dozens of new seams and carefully clipped the horizontal seam allowances to remove every scrap of unnecessary bulk... and it hardly made a difference. There was still a lot of fabric at the waist. So I unpicked the pink skirt, again, and took in all the seams on the black panels so it fitted me much more closely.  Then I gathered the pink onto the black extension pieces. Success!

The lining kept wanting to slip sideways so I hand sewed the outer layer to the lining at the front and side seams. This has the added benefit of smoothing out the edges of the silhouette.


And so what we have learnt...

•  I think the main problem here was a fitting issue. Between starting and finishing this dress I have learned a bit more about how to fit clothes and I think I need to make it standard practice to lengthen waistlines by about an inch as the first thing I do with a pattern. I do think extending the lining so the gathering is lower is a good idea, but the outer layer needs to be close-fitted lower as well.
•  I kind of regret cutting the pink as part of the first fix; it has too many seam lines now. It folds more nicely than it did, probably because it's gathered on to a smaller circumference, making more folds. The fabric still might be too stiff, but I like it so that doesn't count. :-)
• I learned that while zips need to be longer in dresses that have fitted skirts they can be shorter in dresses with full skirts. I'd had difficulty finding zips long enough to get my 40s dresses on easily, so for this dress I bought the longest invisible zip I could find. It is way too long. I hadn't thought about the difference skirt shape makes. The skirt on this dress is at least a full circle. The extra zip length bulges weirdly so I might go back and cut it off.  

I wore the dress to work last week and spent the whole day feeling fabulous, so it has all turned out well in the end.

I will not call this post Winter is Coming. I will not...

Did I say last year that I wanted to do some stashbusting this year? *checks blog* I did. Well, in a shocking and unlikely turn of events I have actually done some. We had a cold snap a few weeks ago and I was nearly too cold to move (in house temperatures ranged between 17 and a remarkably chilly 24 – it wasn't that cold, but my body doesn't understand the concept of producing heat). I missed my justacorps* terribly.

Back in high school I was bit obsessed with the justacorps. I made one (in magenta corduroy) from Simplicity 3677 but later adapted the pattern to be historical based on this pattern from Maurice Leloir's Histoire du Costume and made a new one out of highly unhistorical polar fleece and three big plastic buttons.

This coat was very cosy indoors (but the wind went straight through it so wasn't great for outside) and was my warm winter coat for several years (and no-one ever recognised it as a pirate coat). Sadly both justacorps are now worn out and have been relegated to the dress up box.

So, back in the cold near-present, I decided to make a new fleecy coat. I had already bought and mocked up McCalls 7025 so that seemed like a good idea. Making it properly would also give me a chance to try following the instructions and test it a bit more thoroughly.

The colours were determined by what fleece was in the stash. I had a fair bit of blue left over from the justacorps and the pink came from some pyjamas mum made me many years ago. I tested colour arrangements by colouring in the line drawing of the pattern. The whole thing is lined with the blue fleece for extra cosiness. I used up all the pink, all the black and most of the blue, making a noticeable increase in cupboard space.

Even though for the most part I treated the stretch fabric as if it was woven, I did use some of the techniques I learned in the stretch sewing class I did the week before. I used a stretch stitch and a stretch needle – I worked out which one to use by looking up ‘fleece’ in the Schmetz app. I decided not to hem the skirts; I just used the decorative topstitching to hold the layers together. I didn't do the decorative stitching through two layers on the bodice because that would have made it impossible to have the waist seam hidden inside the lining. Unfortunately, sewing through only one layer made the stitching a lot less stable because the fabric kept stretching.

Back when I was looking for a new sewing machine the thing that convinced me to buy this model (Brother NV610) was its ability to stitch sideways. I finally had a need for that feature on this coat because pivoting multiple layers of fleece around a needle is not particularly easy. I did use forward sewing for most of it but when it was just a few stitches to match up lines I was very glad of the sideways feature.

Within a week I had a new cosy coat. I think it looks strange but it achieves its purpose – which is to be cosy and warm.



*18th century coat, known in the vernacular as a pirate coat.