I decided to make a dress suitable for wearing to a friend's wedding and as I had recently had delivery of just over 2 metres of bargainous olive green dupion silk, I thought that some sort of sophisticated cocktail dress would be in order.
Step forward Vogue 5942.
And a bow! How I love a bow.
As my fabric was so lovely and I had a whole weekend with no plans I decided that I should do the right thing and make a toile first. Am I glad I did.
When I opened the pattern I noticed something amiss. The pattern pieces had no printing on them! Just plain pieces of tracing paper with holes in them! This meant a lot of referring back to the instructions as regards cutting out etc. I was tempted to give up there and then. But I persevered and managed to work out what pieces went where - eventually. Once the actual sewing started things seemed to be going well, I made the bodice and it fit beautifully. I made the skirt, this too seemed to fit nicely. The problem arose when I put the pieces together - if I lined the zip hole in the bodice up with the zip hole in the skirt the seams on the skirt were horribly wonky. If I lined up the seams on the skirt so that they looked like the drawing then the two zip holes were a good 3 inches apart - what to do?
The solution was obvious. I had a glass of wine and gave up for the night. I'd been working for about 7 hours on it by now and my patience was pretty much exhausted.
The next day I started afresh - with a bold new plan! I would sew up the stupid under-the-armhole zip-holes and put a good old-fashioned back zipper in! There was a centre seam down the back of the skirt and I could just add a bit on to the bodice. I decided to test this on the toile and cut that bodice in half, ripped out some of the back seam on the skirt and (badly) stitched a manky old spare zip in. Success! The results looked pretty good (if you didn't examine the actual quality of the sewing too closely).
With renewed enthusiasm and a spirit of derring-do I set out to cut the pieces out for real.
Great! Sometimes the fact that a given garment problems simply make it more like it when completed. Good job!
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