Apologies for the photo-less post, but with four weeks to go to the wedding, the planning has gone from busy-but-manageable to STRESSAPALOOZA! And as a result, I haven’t had a chance to take the photos of my beautiful lining prickstitching off the camera yet.
But before I forget, I wanted to describe a slight setback I ran into in preparing to attach the skirt to the bodice. To start the process I removed the central skirt panel that contained the blue dye stain (from the tissue paper it was stored in for 60 years), and sewed the two gored sections together, which makes a really unexpectedly beautiful central detail. But as I was lining up the centre front, centre back, and side seams on the skirt and bodice to make the skirt pleats, I kept having excess fabric on one side of the front skirt.
Scratching my head, I measured the front of the skirt, and the CF is indeed central. So then I measured the seam line of my bodice, and ERRRRRRRR! the right side is 27cm to the CF point and the left is 24cm. So that’s why I was having excess skirt fabric on the left but having it match almost exactly on the right.
So I put it all back in its box and mulled over what to do for a bit. Adding fabric (either to the bodice or skirt) is impossible, so the solution is to either take away 3cm from the right side of the bodice, or from the left side of the skirt. and the more I thought about it, the more I realised what had happened – when I elongated the waist and added length to all the bodice pieces, I flared out the pieces slightly below the waist (logically, because my high hip is not as small as my waist). But because the right side has three seamlines and the left doesn’t have any, I had inadvertently added some room on the right side…
So I’m going to double-check with a quick fitting, but I think I’m going to trying pinching a little bit out of the right side seam lines (even though that means unpicking a few inches of stitching and catchstitching, because I’m making it smaller, my current seamline needle holes won’t show) and if I can’t pinch out all 3cm, then I’ll take a slight amount out from the left side of the skirt. But really, the length difference is only noticeable because of the skirt pleating inbalance – when I’m wearing just the bodice, it doesn’t look uneven in the slightest.
(Yes, this is the part where all of you who suggested I muslin the skirt get that smug look on your face! But my original reasons for not muslining the skirt still hold, and fixing this won’t put me back more than a day anyway so I stand by my earlier decision!)
Coming up…
The weird and wonderful August La Mia Boutique! (But more importantly, HOLY CRAP, Burda’s September issue is SMOKIN’ hot! I’ve counted 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 MUST–SEWS for me in this issue! That’s more than the entire previous year combined!)