Fine Tuning Vogue 9057

The pants performed only okay when I wore them yesterday. Center front of the waistband needs to be lifted about 3/4". I kept pulling them up because they were doing that pouching thing. This is fiddly and I could probably ignore it but I'll love them even more with the adjustment. I'm going to finish a few other garments first before that. When I get to them, I'll need to take the elastic out, remove the front section of the waistband, lower it about 5/8" at center front and angle the seam line to the hip, restitch, re-top stitch, and replace the elastic. It'll be good and worth it. I think I'll wear these pants a lot.





Remember paper doll me? I used view B of Vogue 9057 as my illustration and yesterday I started working on it. Since I can't tell by the paper top how much to shorten the real one, I started by adjusting the pattern tissue so that the short end would be my normal length. That's the image on the...





... left which as you can see is still too long so I pinned up a tuck increasing the size until I felt the proportions were right. I think it now looks about the same proportion as the paper top. This is another 2" shorter or 4" in total. That's interesting from a ready-to-wear perspective as well. When I went snoop shopping last week, everything seemed too long and I'm seeing women out in public looking far frumpier than necessary because their tops need shortening.

Yesterday was my coaching call with Diane. I sent the long and shortened images for feedback. She agreed that the shorter length was great and had a totally different suggestion for shortening it than I had - tucks versus whacking off the bottom. My assignment is to shorten the top 2" without cutting it off. There will be a future post about that process.





Along with shortening, I will fine tune the fit of the armhole. Above is the way the shoulder seam looked after I inserted the sleeve and below...





... sorry for the fuzzy picture... is the way it looks after pinning the seam to form an L shape. This is very similar to what happened with the crotch curve in yesterday's posting. Underarm and crotch curves have a lot in common. Mine are more L than J shaped.





Here's the line that I'll be stitching to get that better look. I'll make this adjustment to the front pattern tissue but leave the sleeve pattern as is for next time. The stretch of the knit is allowing me to get away with it this time but in most cases I would need that bicep width on the sleeve.





The grey knit goes wonderfully with the ugly experience fabric which is a heavy knit with great drape. It may be what is being referred to as scuba knit. I'm not sure. I wanted to sew a pair of one seam pants and had more than enough fabric except when I went to lay it out, the pattern goes crosswise and this print is linear. I didn't want lines across my hips so I'll use view B of the out of print McCall's 6515 instead.

Talk soon - Myrna

Grateful - coaching