Dear Plaid Flannel...

Dear Plaid Flannel,

We need to break up.  We've had a good run, but it's over.  

It's not you, it's me.

xoxo

Sometimes a Frankenpattern works, sometimes it doesn't.  In point of fact, the actual Frankenpattern *did* work, it just doesn't look good on me.  Win some, lose some.

So, details: in late summer, I bought some very cheap plaid flannel from fabric.com with some slight misgivings, my previous experience with cheap plaid flannel being rather disastrous.  When it arrived, I was cautiously optimistic.  It washed well, seemed to hold its grain after, and I thought might actually work for the dress I intended, which was a woven M7353.

I set those plans aside when I attempted to make a different plaid flannel garment and had serious issues with keeping the fabric on grain.  In short, it was so difficult, I had to abandon the project before I even really got it entirely cut out.  I still don't really understand it--it was Kaufman Mammoth flannel, and I've never had much trouble with it before, and I was reusing from an earlier garment that I'd matched all along the side seams.  Humph.  

I also made an Everyday skirt out of some Kaufman Durango flannel (a checked plaid) that just didn't turn out.  I mean, it is finished, and the plaid matches, but the skirt looks really bad on me.  Really, really bad.  Not sure if it is the plaid, the heavy weight flannel, the colors in the flannel or what, but it was a complete disaster.

After all that, I wasn't in the mood to match plaid any time soon.

After my Washi successes, however, I wondered about putting the M7353 bodice on the Washi skirt, since I really liked how the skirt fit, and I like how the fitted dolman sleeves on the M7353 look.  I couldn't get the idea out of my head.  I figured since the dress had longer sleeve options, it had a reasonable chance of looking okay.

The combination also seemed like a great winter combination that could be warmed up further with additional layers.  I have some non-plaid flannel that I want to make a Christmas dress out of (I know, I know), but I didn't want to try a new frankenpattern on the good stuff, so I decided to start with the cheap plaid I bought in the late summer and set aside.  The colors of my plaid are lovely (a deep claret red, yellow, spruce green, and black), but as I began to work with it, I realized that it was very thin.  Very very thin.  Stark contrast to my snuggly Mammoth flannel.

I cut everything out flat, while watching the BBC Pride and Prejudice.  It was a good sewing companion that day.  I felt good about how the plaid matching was going, and was feeling a bit confident that I might even get a wearable dress in the end--for the win!

Except.  I had graded up the sleeves on the bodice another 1/4" from my usual woven adjustments, and I think that was mistake number one.  Mistake number too was making the back elastic a bit looser than on my previous Washi dresses (5" shorter than the back width instead of 6").  Mistake number three was the skirt length, which looked decidedly frumpy in this fabric.  

These are all things I can theoretically change--I could take in the sleeve seams, cinch in the elastic, take up the hem, etc.  But the other two problems are a bit more intractable.  Number one is that the flannel is really too thin to be useful on its own in cold weather, and that was the whole point of this dress.  Number two is that the color combination looks really really bad with my skin tone.  For some reason it reads brown on me, and brown is generally a bad idea.  So I'm not sure it is worth trying to fix any thing on this dress, given that.  I know, I could add layers, put my burgundy L'Enveloppe over it, add a cowl, break up the plaid near my face, yadda, yadda, but that starts to get fussy.

In truth, I haven't decided what to do yet.  I was so appalled by how bad it looked on me, I took it off immediately and put it out of sight.  I think this is one piece that Stasia would say: let it go.  But maybe I'll try it on again in a few weeks and reevaluate.  In any case, I couldn't bear to take photos in it, so hanger photos it is.

In the meantime, I wanted to document my mad plaid matching skillz (*snort*), particularly in this fabric, which was SUPER hard to work with.  I don't recall working with a harder fabric than this, and that includes rayon bemberg.  It went off grain constantly, the plaid lines weren't really completely straight, so matching was very difficult.  

Still, it was a good experiment: a chance to try something new and do something hard, and I'm glad I tried it. I think I'll just make a regular Washi in the "good" flannel.  (The "good" stuff has a washi tape design and there is something in me that gets a kick out of the idea of making a Washi washi dress).