Vogue 8630

This is the view as I look straight down at my toes while wearing my muslin. See that toe peeking out? The muslin came out surprisingly good and I am sure having the various cup sizes made it work. The "C" fit perfectly except for my usual excess between apex and shoulder and that was easily fixed by deepening the shoulder seam.

The big issue, and really only other issue was what you see in the picture above. This happens to me a lot in dresses. I have wide hips. I have a relatively small waist. This means a big dart in the front of the garment whenever one is specified. But this is where it gets weird. I have a short front crotch rise. My lower tummy has always been very flat, almost concave. Is that a tilted pelvis? I think it could be from what I've read. I have made darts in pants that are probably half the length that you would normally use. The dart ends so that the end of it is filled out by my mature tummy fluff. But it can look weird doing that sometimes and it looked weird with that fix on the muslin. In the pic you can see the long dart puffs out beyond my tummy and has tons of dead air underneath. Its all very weird. I've run into this many times over the years and my solution is to turn the dart into a pleat. The fullness gets released softly and falls straight down instead of puffing out like the dart.   I don't have this problem in the back because my booty generously fills out the back darts in the skirt. So that point lump has been converted to a pleat and it looks better.

Here's something I learned from Sandra Betzina. If you fold the pleats outward, your tummy will look flatter and your hips wider. If you fold the pleats toward center front, your hips will look narrower and your tummy more fluffy. I folded them toward center front. I also pegged the skirt. Short women with wide hips can look pretty dumpy with the side seams hanging straight toward the floor. But pegging a skirt can make those wide hips look even wider. Think of an inverted triangle. I go easy on the pegging tapering in to 3/8ths of an inch at the side seams. Any more is not good but this small amount really helps.

I was all set to do some brilliant matching for you but turns out I am not that brilliant, or this print is barely matchable. The horizontal repeats once and that repeat is  only a quarter of the pattern. The length repeat is 24 inches. While I had a fair amount of extra fabric, I would have needed a huge amount to make it work. I tried, I really tried. As close as I got had me with two giant flowers with big dark centers either right on my boobs, right under them or on the hills of my buttocks. To use the less defined fabric for those areas did not work with the limited horizontal matching I could do because of the one  and a quarter repeat horizontally. SWhat you see above is the beginning of the game. An hour and a half later is was decision time. It was either ignore the print completely or try to get the flowers off the boobs and find a "rough match" that would not glaringly stick out. I think 've made it work with the second option and hope the print is camouflage enough to look OK. I think it is.

One thing I really like about this pattern is the shaping. Above you see the center back  and how it curves in toward the waist on the left instead of just being a vertical line. Nice on that one, Vogue. The center back of the skirt is also curved in so this would work well for those swaybacks. I did not have to do any swayback adjustment and that really surprised me. 

At this point all is cut out. There are three layers in the skirt only, fashion fabric, the net layer and the batiste underling. The bodice is fashion fabric and underlining only. Seams all have the Honk Kong finish added where they can be. I like to do that seam finish as much as possible before construction of the garment. It is so much easier that way. Don't you love that antique gold color charmeuse for the binding? If you are interested there is a tutorial on doing the Hong Kong seam finish here. 

Why no muslin pics? Well, Mr. Avedon did a poor job  of them , taking them from way too high at a weird angle.  Given that he was cleaning every window and screen in the house, a chore we always share, and I was in the studio all day, I was not in a position to complain. I thanked him very much, tried to do some mirror pics of my own but that is not something I've ever been good at. At least you got to see my bulging tummy darts. I am going to hit this again big time tomorrow so I can get it out of the way. Still waiting for my hat to arrive...................Bunny