Vogue 8593 Progress

Slowly but surely I am making progress on the Vogue dress. The biggest challenge was making the FBA for a single pattern piece. I pulled out my trusty FFRP book. Though I never found FBA for single all in one front pattern piece example, I did run across an example for completing a FBA for dress.

Their process requires cutting off the bottom half of the dress pattern, make the FBA and then re-tape the bottom to top. I did that as well. Here's a shot of the front pattern piece and the FBA I made.

This shot shows where I evened up the bottom edge of the upper portion of the dress and then reattached the cut off pieces.

I sewed on the dress this AM and this afternoon. I had to make some additional fitting adjustments. I had to let out the waist and tummy area as I found the dress to tight in that area. The back fit well fairly well from waist down, though I thought the back darts at the waist and top of buttocks was snug. By letting the back darts out some at that area and taking a 3/8 seam at the waist area to top of hip eliminated the tightness at the front.

The upper back is a little to full and I may deepen the dart at the upper back to take out some of this fullness. The side darts resulting from the FBA seem to be a little low, but wearable.

I added extra width to the sleeves as I felt the upper sleeve area was rather snug. The extra in that area proved to be the right addition. However I do not need the fullness from the elbow down. So the dress will not be complete before I return to work. I need to make some of the tweaks noted above and I have to attach the neckline facing.

This leads to my concern over the neckline pleats. Carolyn-Diary of Sewing Fanatic-indicated in her review of her dress that she stitched the pleats down. I am still considering that for this dress. As much as I like the pleat feature and is what drew me to the pattern, I do have some concerns about those pleats and a full busted person. There is a dress in a 2008 BWOF that also included pleats at the neckline/chest area. I remember reading that it was suggested that if you are full busted person that you may want to stitch down the pleats. Carolyn also suggested a good pressing of the pleats and I think that is good idea as well.

I hope that I will have time during the week to work on this. My work schedule thus far for the week will hopefully accommodate my having a few evenings to spend 10-20 to 30 minutes on the dress.