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Here's what I loved:
- I thought that the detailing was divine - I would have been utterly delighted by it all, had it hung in the right way on me.
- It was so nice (the idea at least, it didn't work out that way in reality) that someone else had done all the hard work of drafting the pattern.
- Once I understood how to use the pattern pieces and how you can blend between sizes I thought it was ingenious.
- The notches that you cut to use as markers to align two pieces of material were a complete revelation (I normally draw lines on, but the notches work so much better and are obvious from both sides).
- I thought that the sleeve that grew out of the yoke was the most wonderful idea and one that I will incorporate into my own dress designs in the future.
- I was left with utter admiration for the people who are able to put together a dress pattern that will fit so many different sizes and even allow for you to shorten the waist easily if you are petite like me.
- Those pockets! They are completely adorable, so easy to do once you know how and I love them to bits. I did think on my fifth time of resewing the side seams and altering the pockets to be in line with the seam AGAIN that perhaps I should just leave them off - I'm soooooo glad that I didn't.
Here's what I liked less: - Using a pattern made me sew in a less intuitive way. The instructions told you to apply interfacing to the neck and sleeve bands...if I'd have been thinking for myself I would have known that the denim was heavy enough all ready and doing this has left these areas feeling too weighty.
- I thought that the instructions were really unclear in places...so many strokey beard moments when actually what they were intending you to do was quite simple...just not very clearly communicated.
- The whole balloon on the bottom thing...this was the only part of the dress that I thought was badly designed...the rest was completely dreamy and would have been perfect if I'd have chosen my size more carefully.
- The finishing in general seemed to be sloppy - I don't feel proud of this dress on the inside and I thought lots of opportunities for achieving a more perfect finish on the inside were completely missed. A lot of the time they were instructing you to do things in a way that felt a bit like bodging it...but I'll know that for next time and will plan ahead around this as they do suggest that you can bind seams etc in the more general instructions separate from the actual pattern.
- It said that denim was a suitable material for the dress, but by the time I'd applied the interfacing and accomodated double layers of material in the neck band, it was too bulky to allow for a zip to be installed nicely and so it's an over-the-head dress...which is fine, but again, makes it feel poorly finished as I would have sewn it different at the start if it wasn't to have an opening at the back.
Will I use a shop bought pattern again? Hmmm. I'm intrigued to know how it would fit if I used the right size, so I'm tempted. However, some very interesting books arrived from Amazon today that may just send me in the opposite direction all together...I shall blog about them in my next post once I've taken some photos of them (as well as showing you my sister's dress that I made her for Christmas that I meant to show you such a long time ago...the problem is that every time I talk about dresses I want to make another one...it's a vicious circle. I feel like I may never want to do anything else again.v