Monday, April 25, 2011

Easter dress and pants fit update

I wore my dress today! You remember, the one I wasn't sure I liked.
And I love it!! The brown accents are fun and I love the length. It feels kicky and fun. The fit isn't bad, but I think I'm just getting more picky about fit. I'd have been thrilled to find anything that fit this well off the rack, so I'm pleased. That said, I think I'm going to need to start looking closer at the fit in my shoulders. I think I may need to start making a broad back adjustment as a standard change for me. I didn't in this dress and it pulls a bit when I cross my arms in front of my chest.

What about those pants I'm working on? I want to thank everyone for the comments, emails and links you all sent me. I love the support from the sewing community! You are all awesome!! Myrna, who has a similar figure to mine, reminded me of a similar journey that she made while fitting pants. Her posts here, here and here, were so helpful! I'm linking them for your benefit, but also so that I can find them again. The old memory just ain't what it used to be...
So, my next step will be to get a flexible curve to measure my own crotch curve more closely, but I did do some tweaking of the current pants to see what I could do just by deepening the crotch curve.
What do y'all think? I'm pretty happy with how well they fall now. It isn't perfect, but I'm calling it good enough.
Here is the altered pattern piece. The original seamline is in blue with my altered seamline in red. I dropped the crotch curve down nearly an inch and pinched out about 5/8 of an inch from the back waist. You can see how different the shape is from the original curve.
Joy had asked how the alteration affected the side seam, and I am happy to say, it is still nice and straight.

Pants fitting is very interesting. Everything is so interrelated, but not at all intuitive for me. I'm excited to have this pair coming along so nicely. Hopefully, I'll have a completed pair to show you in a couple of days. Every time I tried them on, Mitch asked if I was going to line them, so I finally took the hint and am adding a full lining.

Thanks again to everyone who helped me fine tune these. I so much appreciate all the help! It's so great to have so many educated eyes to scrutinize my work. You all rock!

5 comments:

Cindy said...

The dress looks beautiful! The brown belt really polishes the look off. The pants are nice too!

Anonymous said...

They looked good before, now they look great. The nice thing about fitting pants is that usually it only takes a tiny change to make a big difference :)

Sandi said...

I agree with you about pants fitting not being intuitive. I think that's why I haven't messed with it too much. Yours are coming along great, though.

Jane M said...

Your dress looks so bright and perfect with your coloring. I think the pants fit wonderfully. Won't it be great to have a TNT pants pattern. I'm close but not there yet.

Marjie said...

The Easter dress came out nicely; the color is wonderful on you. Did you get a picture of the kids in all their matching Easter finery? My UPS driver's wife used to make matching dresses for herself, her mother and her 2 daughters, with coordinating things for her son for every holiday. I had to admire her energy. (She also made her own wedding dress, and the dresses for her 5 sisters, mother and mother in law. I wonder how long she planned that wedding to have time for all that sewing?)