Asian Florals

Today I present The Dress That Didn't Make the Cut.  Otherwise known as The Asian Florals dress.  This dress was an experiment.  Earlier this spring, when I was putting together my summer sewing projects, I was thinking about interesting ways to change up my Dottie Angel pattern, and it occurred to me that it would probably mesh well with the Afternoon blouse pattern, which had just been re-released as a dress pattern.  I bought it when it initially came out, probably two years ago, and printed it and cut it out, but never actually got around to making it up.

The shapes were so similar, the sleeve treatments, etc, that I figured it would have to work.  I had the blouse pattern already printed and cut, and decided to overlay it on the Simplicity 1080 and figure out the lines from there.  I was eager to find a neckline treatment that would allow me to use some of my button collection.  I do love me a good vintage button card.

My first problem is that I had cut the Afternoon blouse pattern when my bust was significantly bigger than it is now (40+" vs. a scant 36" today).  The blouse has no shaping or darts, other than a curved side hem, so it should have occurred to me that this would be a problem, since the Simplicity 1080 pattern gets its shape from bust tucks (or in some of my iterations, elastic).  I also didn't account for the wide v-neck shoulders.  My shoulders are fairly narrow, and a wide neckline is almost always a mistake.

The good news is that the Afternoon blouse pattern helped me to fix the cut-on sleeves in my sloper for the Simplicity 1080.  I prefer more upper arm coverage than the original 1080 has, and have been tinkering with the shoulder length all spring.  By the time I got to this dress, I knew that I liked about 9" length and 9 1/2" opening.  The Afternoon blouse is basically that straight out of the packet, and has a nice curved under sleeve to boot.  I basically used her sleeve length, opening and under-sleeve length and transferred them to my Simplicity redraft.  I've not had any problems with the sleeves since I did this--I recommend it if you are struggling with the kimono sleeves.  

The nice thing about cut-on sleeves vs. kimono is that they are easier to finish with bias, but they also give a good range of motion, whereas a kimono sleeve can restrict the shoulder slightly.

So I made the dress up, finished the edges with bias, tried it on, and realized it was way too big on me.  And the color (which had looked more saturated on the screen when I bought it) really washed me out.  I wasn't really sure what to do at that point.  I pinched the excess material in the front and put in two pretty large bust tucks, and decided to call it well enough.  

This dress isn't going into my summer rotation because I don't think it is particularly flattering on me, but I did want to show the pattern experiment, because I do think that was worth it.  (Plus it is a nice dress to wear on an icky-sticky day at the end of a weird spring rotation; I've washed all my spring rotation clothing and sort of don't want to sweat through anything before tomorrow)  If the fabric looked better on me, I'd probably take the time to unpick the bias on the neckline and take it in, as well as fitting it better through the body.

But I just need to get over it and let this dress go.  It's just too big, and the color is not good on me.  I'll keep the buttons for another project, as I have quite a few of them (I picked them up in a clearance bin in a random fabric store downtown).  If I tried it again, I'd size down the top, take in the back neckline with some darts, and probably narrow the v-neckline a tad.  

Win some, lose some.