A) not pre washing your fabric

B) making a shoddy job of up-sizing a top pattern

I will confess I have some what lost my sewjo this year, after finishing The Dress For Liz, which I had a deadline for I’ve sort of been at a loss, so I have decided to fix a couple of sewing disasters. You might remember this border print dress after I finished it I washed it, apparently I hadn’t washed it before cutting it out doh…to be honest back then I didn’t always pre wash, I’d never had a problem until this dress.

After taking it apart and giving it a good iron I compared the pattern pieces and discovered that each skirt piece (8 in all) have lost 5/8 th of an inch that was a lot of shrinkage, no wonder it no longer fitted

So I have re-cut the skirt luckily I had already decided that I didn’t like the way a the hem looked and I was planning on shortening the skirt anyway, which was just as well as to get the width from the skirt pieces I needed to cut off about 2 inches from the top of them.

Luckily I had enough fabric left over from the original fabric to totally re-cut the bodice, which I have done, I also make the adjustment that I would usually make by taking 3/4 inch out of the bodice.

So far I have but all the darts back in, 2 in each skirt piece and three in the front bodice, unfortunately it is a bit hot at the moment for ironing, but this is England so I’ll just give it a couple of days 🙂

The other dress this one I made a bit of a hash of it, it was too big but because of the cut-out I couldn’t just re-cut the bodice from the original, I had to buy another half metre of fabric.

Out of the new fabric I have cut the front bodice and half of the facings, I’ve used the original back peice and cut that smaller and have cut the front neck facing from fabric left over from the original fabric.

So far I have overlocked the original skirt pieces, done the darts in the bodice and again waiting for the weather to break.

UPDATE

Didn’t manage to get this posted before the weather broke, as I said this is England.

I now have all the pintucks done in the border print dress, and the 8 skirt panels have all been overlocked.
On the other dress I have the bodice put together, it is now waiting for the facings to be put on.

bye for now