Nemesis thwarted

Finally!  It’s done!  The pink dress of doom is no longer a dress of doom but now a dress of va-va-voom!  Or almost, anyway…

Finally...the finished product!

So what if it doesn’t look much like what it was supposed to?  It’s way better than what it was.  Check both out here (if you dare).

After spending way too long with my seam-ripper taking it all apart, re-sewing it, taking it apart again, (rinse, lather, repeat) I finally decided on a course of action which was to take the top part of the bodice from my best-fitting dress pattern and adjust it to fit the remainder of the dress.  It was such a simple solution, I’m kicking myself that I didn’t think of, and implement, it earlier.  It could have saved me from my current feelings of nausea whenever I see pink.

Bodice, or yoke, with the reversed fabric

I made a quick muslin of the bodice to ensure that it would work the way I (eventually) envisaged, and when that seemed to fit the bill, I turned the muslin into the lining.

Op-shopped bed linen for lining

I had to bring the side seams in rather a lot – 60s style straight shifts look awful on me! Who do they suit? - and reattach the zipper for the 40th time, but once that was done (by hand) the dress was finally complete.  Hurrah!  I’ll get a photo of me wearing it soon – it’s way too cold here at the moment for me to even consider getting in and out of clothing for the sake of showing off!

And keeping with my promise to myself that once I’d finished a UFO that I could make something from scratch I whipped up another version of my favourite dress (check out the others here and here).

Simplicity 4744

I’ve already made two other versions of this, however, each are slightly different from the others.  With this most current version, I omitted the pleats right on the sides and it ended up having a sleeker, more sophisticated skirt shape, being more fitted around the hips, rather the usual flare.

Isn't the fabric dreamy?

As I’ve made this dress a couple of times already it went together like a dream, and took only a few hours (including hand sewing the hem, and hand-picking the zipper).  I love those patterns that fit, and just work so easily.  I need to get more of those into my repertoire.  In the mean time, I’ve a couple more projects on the go, and a few more finished ones that I’m loving at the moment, but at the moment I’m so relieved that the Dress of Doom is off my sewing table, I’ll leave the updates there.

My secret shame

Like a lot of crafters (I can’t be the only one, surely?) I knew I had a few unfinished objects (UFOs) around the house, but until we packed up our last house in order to move, I didn’t realise just how many I actually had…

This is just one box…I have a few more stashed in another box because they wouldn’t all fit in this one, so there’re quite a few sad looking half (or not even) finished garments just waiting to be either put out of their misery or brought back to life.  The UFOs became that way for a variety of reasons: fit issues, loss of interest, shunted aside in favour of a new, more exciting project and possibly some other small reasons as well.  I am determined to get my pile of UFOs under control and have pledged to assess and either toss impossible, awful, unfixable garments (recycling the fabric into another project, of course!) or fix, re-fit and finish those that I can salvage.  For each new project I begin, I have to eliminate at least one UFO from my pile.

In the interest of beginning on the right foot I decided to tackle an UFO before beginning anything new.  This is my first:

As you can see (or perhaps not?) it’s miles too big.  I’m not sure how this happened…I don’t strictly remember because it was so long ago, but I’m sure I would have measured, double checked everything, and I certainly haven’t lost any weight since I started this.  Because the fabric came from my trip to India last year, and is so, so lovely, I would have been extra sure that everything would have been okay…something – obviously – went very, very wrong.  Alright I’m over my little rant.  This is what it’s supposed to look like:

Butterick 4623

In addition to the huge (no pun intended) sizing issues, I also had not finished sewing the sleeves…

…taking the tacking out of the zipper…

…or started hemming the little blighter (no photograph required)…

The major issues with getting this into the wardrobe clearly begin with sorting out what the heck went wrong with the sizing and how the heck to fix it without hacking the gorgeous fabric to pieces.

Ugh!  Wish me luck!