Iterations

With a design chosen, it's time to start making a pattern.  After working at it for a bit, this is more difficult than I thought it was going to be.  We started by learning how to make a basic sheath pattern by combining the bodice and skirt patterns.  After removing 3/8" from the bodice waistline, closing one of the darts in the skirt, and slashing and spreading the narrower of the two pieces, these pieces can be combined.  Here's the half-size pattern.

Unfortunately, in the full-size pattern, the skirt front and skirt back end up not being the same width, so more pattern adjustments  have to be made.  I'm still working on getting that part fixed.  Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my homework home!  (I did bring it back from the classroom to my office on Thursday, but due to numerous other meetings Thursday afternoon and complications with needing to take my bike home and rain, I didn't take the pattern pieces home that day.  I never made it back to the office on Friday since I was gone to a conference. So on Saturday I'm blogging about my problems instead of actually solving them.)

Meanwhile, trying to lay out the asymmetric bodice did make me think more clearly about the design.  My original design sketch said to make the dress with a back zipper.  However, after looking at the back view of the original pattern, I found that it didn't have a zipper.  And a suggestion from the instructor that I add pockets in the skirt (of course!  I hate skirts and slacks without pockets) made me think about the features that I really like in a dress.  Back zippers are not at the top of my list.  Thus I decided to eliminate the zipper in back and change to button-front closure, which meant I had to do something to open the skirt at the waist.

My first thought was to extend the bodice opening down to about mid-thigh and put a hidden placket in the skirt.  This might be the easiest option. However, to really get the placket in, the skirt needs a seam down the skirt, which means the dart on the other side also needs to be a seam, which leads to princess seams.

Instead of a hidden placket, it occurred to me that I could turn this dress into a coat dress.  The darts in the original design were just at the side bust and waist.  When I tried drawing the pattern for the bodice front, I had trouble figuring out where to position the three buttons and getting the dimensions right for the neckline swoops.  A retired professor who was visiting our class suggested that the buttons needed to fall on a seam line.

Note that I still need to figure out where the princess seam falls at the shoulder in relation to the two inset pieces.  Should it be outside the insets?  Exactly meet the inset? End on the second inset?

Just last week, a friend helped me clean out my closet, and we went through the cedar chest, too.  At the bottom I found my hot pink "birthday suit". (For my birthday one year Mom bought the fabric, Aunt M bought  the pattern, and Granmom sprang for the twenty-five gold buttons.  Mom helped me put it together and it was a definite learning experience.)  Alas, I no longer have a twenty-four inch waist, so I can't button it all the way down any more.  My friend suggested I could wear it open as a coat.  This pattern is a coat dress, and I loved it.  Since I still have the pattern, I thought I'd dig it out and check out where the seams were in relation to the buttons.

This pattern has the princess seams ending in the armscye instead of on the shoulder.  However, the front pieces are more vertical than my design.  So here are sketches with the seam in the armscye.  Last considering: should the design be truly asymmetric, with the underside of the bodice forming a round neckline, or should the two pieces be more symmetric, with a curved vee neckline? I think these were all the iterations that I should have made for the last sketch assignment.

And, if this is a coat dress, it needs to be fully lined.  I read all the pattern piecing instructions for that Ralph Lauren dress -- there were a lot of steps!  But, it was a beautifully finished dress.  Decisions, decisions.  Feels free to weigh in.

Meanwhile, I'm supposed to be keeping a design notebook for this dress with all of these notes included.  Which reminds me that my physics research notebook is languishing with no recent additions.  However, I did conquer LaTeX (sort of) and get a paper submitted for publication this week.