I’ve officially failed on my Crepe Dress, ladies. :(
To recap: I completed three muslins to perfect the fit back in December/January and proceeded to cut out my fashion fabric, but it has since been sitting on a chair in my dining room/sewing room. I picked it up again and started following through Gertie’s Sew Along posts, and got to the point this weekend that I could try on the bodice. And what I saw in the mirror was not good! It was a complete sewing failure.
I’ve had a few days now to cope with this loss, but I have to come clean with you. I was pretty bitter about it on Sunday evening when I tried on the bodice. I even went to show Felix and he didn’t have much to offer, but a small condolence. I think he was hesitating to agree with how bad it was for fear of making me more upset. Poor guy…
As much as it pains me to show you… here is the bad Crepe bodice (pardon my tummy and post-workout red face, please.)
Perhaps it looks good from a (great) distance, but up close it’s a huge mess. (Even in this picture it doesn’t look like a complete failure, but believe me it’s bad.)
- The right side seam (and only the right seam) is misaligned by 3/4 of an inch
- I have narrow shoulders, but these sleeves make me look similar to if I were wearing football padding. (And I already made them smaller, too).
- Armcyce seams aren’t quite aligned with my own shoulder and arm (see above)
- The waist seam is too, too high (see below)
- Darts aren’t deep enough while managing to puff out (see above or below)
- Large flower motif strategically placed (see first picture above…. on my left side….yeah… that’s a large blue flower where it shouldn’t be)
- Piping doesn’t match quite right (my fault I didn’t match the sash color to the shell fabric with the black underlining)
- Uncomfortable
I do realize that most of these issues have to be my own fault since I am the sewer and pattern alter-er. But I am still slightly bitter that it hasn’t worked out after 3 test muslins along with my decided confidence in moving on to cutting the fashion fabric.
This isn’t my first sewing failure but this is my first major sewing failure of 2011. I feel as if I’ve gotten to the point where I shouldn’t be having huge disasters like this, and I think that’s where my bitterness is stemming from. I have a certain expectation of myself and my newly found sewing skills that I’ve come to expect that bad things can’t happen with careful sewing.
When I first started sewing this muslin, I should have known it wasn’t going to work for me, but instead I pushed through muslin after muslin. Perhaps a 4th muslin would have brought my current issues to light. But 6-7 months after making the final muslin in December/January I guess I didn’t remember certain issues that made me put this project on hold in the first place.
I really enjoy sharing all of my sewing and knitting successes with you guys, but this is the first sewing failure that I’ve ever posted about. I find that I get so wrapped up in the good stuff, that I forget to show you the bad or little mistakes I’ve made (and corrected) along the way. I really do love blogs that show all of their muslins and how they’ve made the necessary adjustments to the pattern to accommodate their own shape. I find that this is one of the major ways that I’ve learnt about fitting and how to make adjustments on my own projects. I can’t promise that I’ll be showing all of my muslins in the future, but I’m going to make an effort to try.
How does that sound to you all? Is this something you’d like to see more of on the zilredloh blog(posts about my mistakes, fixes, and muslin fittings)?
As of today, I’ve officially thrown all of my fabric pieces in the garbage since nothing could be salvaged from them and I packed up the pattern pieces back into their envelope and put it back on the shelf. *sigh*
You may recall that on Tuesday’s post about my Lonsdale fabric choice, I mentioned a secondary reason for using the aqua fabric. I was planning on making a second Crepe dress using this aqua fabric, so I wanted to re-purpose it into a new, wearable dress as soon as possible. Instead of having it silently taunt me about my Crepe-fail every time I saw it in my closet.
I truly welcome you all to share some of your *fail* stories to soothe my pain in the comments. :)
In: Sewing
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