An almost unfinished project and swayback

I started this dress last October, from some DVF wool doubleknit I purchased at Stonemountain and Daughter fabrics. I had just made a rayon knit version with fabric purchased during the same trip, and was fresh off a discussion on patternreview about swayback adjustments. One of the suggestions in the thread was this, and as I was quite excited about it at the time I modified my pattern and cut out my nice DVF fabric without even testing it in muslin.

This fix did not work for me. In the back of my mind I was wondering about forming diagonal wrinkles from the shoulder with this alteration but it seemed to work for the other ladies so I forged ahead. I still got fabric pooling in the small of my back, but I ended up with those wrinkles too. And on top of that, the original pattern I used was very plain, which looks great with print fabrics but was downright boring with a solid. I threw it into a pile for at least 3 months, tried it on again and decided it wasn't too bad to wear, and embellished it with some flap pockets, shoulder tabs, longer sleeves, and french cuffs. I wore it quite a bit during the last part of winter, and got a lot of compliments on it. 2 lessons here: always test out pattern alterations before cutting into your good fabric!; and don't be too hard on your 'wadders'. They are probably still better than RTW.

I really like the dress from the front, the pockets/tabs and cuffs help to wake up an otherwise plain dress, and the buttons were from a stash Cidell sent me. (Thank you!!) I didn't have patterns for these, I just constructed them from paper until I was happy with the sizes.








Here's what I don't like. The back of the print dress was pretty good, but there was definitely fabric pooling in the small of my back. The problem is too much length in the CB, not at the side seams. But with no CB or waistline seam, your options for removing it are kind of limited. The fix I tried above attempts to pull it up from the neckline, but as you can see it created diagonal wrinkles from the bottom of my armhole, in addition to not fixing the pool of fabric. I think I will go back to my old standby of darting the CB, laying it on the fold as best as you can, and taking a little out of the side seam. (Like what Marji was talking about in that thread on PR.)



But there's nothing wrong with using that belt to tuck some of the extra fabric under and wearing the heck out of it, right? :-)