SEWN - Vogue 8379: a wrap dress that was not sewed-along

Vogue 8379 by SewingTidbits

vogue-8379-10

Dear readers,

Coming back from Guatemala in March to a clean and organized sewing room had the most surprising effect. I lost all my inspiration. After a week of indecisiveness, I bit the bullet and decided to use a pattern from my stash you probably all know since Mccalls was running a sew-along on their blog. My inability to participate in social events around the sewing community is well documented (or rather un-documented). As soon as I decide to take part in a sew-along or contest, my excitement for the project drops entirely. Also, not getting many opportunities to sew during the week, when I do get to sew, I clock several hours at once. The step by step approach of sew-along - attach the collar, and next week we'll tackle the sleeves - does not work for me. I'm more a #sewuntilyoureyeshurt and #oopsthatsleeveisinsideout kind of person. But I'll admit it, I am weak. I did not know what to sew, I had the pattern in my stash, I love thinking I'm copying designers. So I went for it...

I wrote before about how rarely I work with Big4 patterns and why. I will NOT use 5/8" seam allowances on a knit. Reading the instructions, I realized there was ease in the cap sleeve. Ease in a t-shirt sleeve!! I also checked the many many PR reviews and saw that the skirt is considered very full. I draped size 8 on my form with the paper pattern. The picture is blurry, but you can see how different it looks from the illustration. I decided to redraw the side seam and remove length. The final skirt length is 20," and the hem circumference is 74". I was surprised to find the waistline hitting at the right spot. I assume that it should be lengthened for none petite bodies. Other than that, the bust measurement is quite high, do they believe bust level is where the circled cross is???

I removed 1/4 where the point of the wrap at the bodice meets the waistline to prevent gaping and changed all the SA's to 3/8". I removed 1/4" on each side seam of the bodice, thus a 1" overall. I found around 1" of ease in the sleeve cap. To remove it, I lowered the cap by 3/8"flatten the back portion and remove about 1/2" on each side of the underarm seam (1/4" being due to my intake in the bodice side seam). The dress was sewn entirely on the serger, and what took the most time was probably finding the motivation to catch stitch the facing and the hem. The good part in my procrastination is that with 2 weeks on the form, the skirt had all the times it needed to stretch out so I could safely mark and hem without risking further stretching.

I only did a passable job at making my catch stitching invisible, and it bothers me a little. But definitely not enough to redo it! The fabric is the last piece of a black jersey, which at this stage, I'm not entirely sure I bought it in Paris or in NYC. I get anxious about my memory. When I hear other seamstresses with stashes 20 times the size of mine (yes, it's small), saying that they can remember buying each piece, I'm embarrassed. My entire stash holds in one drawer, and although I think I know everything I own and could mention it from the top of my head, I get surprises every time! Am I the only one? Is my memory particularly bad?

I didn't like spending all this time on the pattern of what I consider a relatively basic knit dress. If you add my low sew-jo and The Old Man's not-so-subtle-comments about spending time on dresses when I mostly wear jeans & shirts, I was about the quit several times. Even when I finished it, I was disappointed. I was planning a pathetic blog post about how I AGAIN sewed something I don't need and how The Old Man was right. But last week, I had a work cocktail, and it ended up being very useful. I got a lot of compliments, including from The Old Man.

I am now convinced that this dress induced a major blogging break. Yes, I blame it on a dress ;-). I started this review a month ago and could not manage to finish it. Final verdict: I will probably wear that dress, but I can't say that I love it. I decided to take it as a lesson. Recently I was discussing with the very smart Seamripped if we sew what we want to wear or wear what we want to sew. In that case, I believe I have been wanting to make a wrap dress for a long time (blame it on the DVF patterns), but I never pictured myself wearing one. So in the future, I want to take let what I want to wear (my fashion board on Pinterest VS my sewing board). If you follow me on Instagram, you saw that I put it into practice twice already...

What about you? How do you decide what to sew?