I Will Fix That Dress Pattern

I took an hour yesterday afternoon, after cleaning up my sewing area, to try on that T-shirt dress again and assess the shaping at the waist and hips. I think I am on the right track. I allowed the bottom half of the dress to ride up to where it fit and looked good. I marked that spot on the dress and then transferred the shaping there to the pattern by taping a piece of Pellon Easy-Pattern underneath the original pattern and drawing in a new side seam:

I then re-traced the entire pattern, front and back, smoothing out the seams with my dressmaker curve, and “walked” the side seams to make sure they matched.

That adjustment adds almost an inch to each side at the high hip, which should be enough. Now I need to test my theory by making up another muslin, hopefully later this week.

Clearly, working with knits adds another layer of complexity to fitting. Had this been a woven dress, it would have been obvious from the start that it didn’t fit properly in that area, but knits—ponte, in this case—stretch. That’s why we like wearing them. But I am of the opinion that knits should skim, not cling, and they most certainly shouldn’t stretch to the point of distortion.

The husband gets pulled into assistant dressmaker duties because I have no one else to help me. I ordered a pair of pants in a size tall that need to be hemmed and he had to pin them up for me.

I wore an entirely me-made outfit to church yesterday—pants and top—and he asked me if I had labels for my clothes. I should order some, if only so I don’t put things on backward. I told him that if I do order some, they are going to say, “IT FINALLY FITS.”

It only took me 40+ years to get here.

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Some of this falls under the category of “you don’t know what you don’t know,” but it’s frustrating. The biggest complaint I hear in my classes is that people don’t know how to get commercial patterns to fit them properly, and it’s no wonder. If I hadn’t run across that article on “8” body shapes, I wouldn’t have known about high hip curves.

Threads has an article on its website from the October/November 1999 issue entitled “Fitting a High Hip vs. a Sway Back,” by Judith Rasland. The full article is behind a paywall. My mother subscribed to Threads from the very beginning and I have all of her issues as well as some from my own subscription back when they were still covering more than just sewing. However, I don’t have that issue. I might do a monthly subscription so I can read the article, because I think it probably has additional insights.

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Today is a paperwork and computer day. I am tying myself to my computer chair until everything is done. I’ve got a podcast interview tomorrow morning, but after that’s done, the rest of my week is (thus far) free and I plan to keep it that way.

Wonderfil’s teacher coordinator e-mailed me last week to let me know that she would be at Sew Expo. She saw that I was teaching and wanted to make sure we connected there. I haven’t met her in person yet because she wasn’t at Sew Expo last year.

I’ve got business cards for the podcast because I expect to do a fair bit of networking while I am there. I know that Whitney of TomKat Stitchery is also planning to attend. She mentioned that in one of her recent videos.

Some years ago, I went to Portland to teach at a Stitches or TKGA event—I can’t remember specifically because I did that a couple of times—and spent several days as a mildly famous knitting celebrity, after which I came home and people wanted to know what we were having for dinner and was there any clean underwear? I am vain enough to want to go be a mildly famous knitting celebrity again for a few days. 😇