Did It Look Like The Photo?

One of the questions on PatternReview.com is - Did it look like the photo/drawing on the pattern envelope once you were done sewing with it?

NO!

On Friday morning, I started sewing together V8780 and on Sunday afternoon, I packaged everything into a bag along with the pattern envelope and some notes and tucked it into a corner of the stash closet. It's not like me to give up but it was either go crazy or take a break. Perhaps for the first time ever, I wondered should I give up sewing. Lately, I seem to be doing a lot of work with little progress. My real goal is wearable clothing.

A friend commented that her daughter does not feel comfortable in clothes and as a result gravitates toward skirts, dresses, and cardigans rather than pants and jackets. My friend felt this was because she had sewn well fitted garments for her daughter throughout her growing up years and now - in her adult years - the daughter is buying RTW which doesn't fit in at all the same way. That's sort of what happened.

All of the reviews I read highly recommended this pattern. It is easy to sew. The pieces are well drafted and fit together as designed. It's just uncomfortable. Look carefully at the picture above. The armscye doesn't sit around the armhole, it pulls back across the top of the shoulder creating an uncomfortable feeling that is compounded by a loose fit in the front and a close fit in the back and the sleeve. Part of the pull could be because of the weight of the back. It could also have been more noticeable with my garment because I used a soft woven instead of a moderate knit. Either way, it was so irritating that I wouldn't have worn the cardigan and I absolutely LOVED the fabric so it seemed worth rescuing.

First, I tried to pin a better armhole shape. The difference was an inch and when I slit the sleeve to see how it would settle, the difference was an inch so it appeared as if I could carve the armhole into a new shape and then use the same sleeve. I couldn't.

Look at pattern piece one. The line at the top is the collar edge. The straight line parallel to the grain line is center front. The bottom and side seam are obvious. Moving from bottom to top up the side seam, the first curve is the armhole, the straight jag is the shoulder, the next corner and horizontal line are the neck edge, and the straight vertical line top left is the center back of the collar. Now imagine how you would fold this down into position.

You'd need to pull the top right corner downward until the center back of the collar curved around into position and the shoulder took shape. The pivot point is the center of the armhole and a huge triangle of fabric needs to move forward and down to create the folds which hang from the armhole. You can't just make the armhole bigger because it isn't the armhole that's to blame. It's simply the the "complication" of drafting everything into one piece. When I clipped the pattern to lay the armhole flat, the armhole shape was drafted correctly SO...

... plan B was to chose a pattern with more pieces that created the folds in a different way. After going through my pattern stash and researching every garment with similar folds at the front, I used the neckline shape from Vogue 8756 to - hopefully - create a shoulder line that sat on the shoulders, an armscye that would curve around the front of the arm, and folds that didn't pivot from the armhole. This is where I discovered that...

... even though it appears that Vogue 8780 would have plenty of ease through the waist and hips, it actually is fitted close enough to require the correct sizing and I'd simply cut on the medium - 12/14 - all the way down instead of merging from a medium to a large - 12/14 to 16/18 - because the large was in a different envelope. Sigh. By now, making this garment work had become a challenge so I bought the other envelope, merged the larger size at the hips, cut out new pieces, sewed the garment together, and...

... the sleeve fits like a dream. The narrow back adjustment without the petite adjustment appears to be working. Nice to know. The rest of the garment?  WAY. TOO. TIGHT! If this was a sheath dress, perfect but not as a cardigan to go over other garments. I could barely reach forward. Plus, I still wasn't loving the front SO....

... I opted to merge the Vogue 8780 back with the V8714 front with an extended peplum. That way, I wouldn't need to sew the back again. In theory.

One of the "selling" features for this pattern was the custom fit cup sizes. For the front, I cut out a 14 C as usual and lowered the bust point 1" as usual. For the back, after comparing the pieces of the Vogue 8780's already cut and stitched back with the Vogue 8714 pattern pieces, I let out the center back seam allowance to 1/4"  and then carefully sewed the rest of the garment together and tried it on and.... still too tight. Not only that, apparently this time my bust wanted to be a higher up D and the front skirt pushes the back skirt around in a funny manner.

Those three? The tipping point.

By now, I was drowning in scraps and pattern paper and frustrated ambitions and while I could see the potential for the garment to eventually finish as something wearable, I didn't have enough energy left to go through one more version. It's in the closet.

Talk soon - Myrna

Grateful - two months later, our front garden is finally finished and all the garbage is off the yard and the front porch and the driveway and everything is neat and clean again.