Sub-Dued…

Yes well.

I looked at the layout on the pattern- the zip at the back, which I didn’t want to include, goes off at an angle.  I decided to give it a go, so used wonder tape to layout the way I wanted it to sit, then found a long strip of silk and made a facing.

I pressed it flat, laid it over the zip, and stitched it down.  Fairly straightforward, although TWICE I got parts of the twisty turny dress caught up in the stitching.  Dammit.  I prevailed.

Then I cut the joined circles and made  a nice long rectangular strip from them, then tapered off one end so that I could insert it at the side seam but maintain the armhole size.  As the bottom circles were still joined, pleating the fabric in crazy ways, this led to some tricky sewing and pressing.  I prevailed.

I then pinned those damned circular holes back together, but decided NOT to stitch just yet.  I turned it carefully to the right side, keeping my arm through it, unzipped, laid it on the floor, stepped in, and started shimmering a tube of fabric full of pins up by body.  Ow.  I prevailed.  The wife looked on in horror.

I got it up my body, but the bodice was still twisted out of whack, when two minutes before, it lay neat and flat on the table.  I cursed, the wife goggled and urged me to give up.  I prevailed.

I had to remove all the pins for the circles that join together over by front, under the bust [more or less] at which point, surrounded by pins all over the floor, the dress sighed and settled into place over bust and shoulders [yes, it DOES fit there]…leaving an enormous 14″ diameter hole right over my belly, and a great mass of mangled, tangled chaos below and behind.  No pictures.  NO PICTURES>

The wife pulled a face.  I glared.  She zipped me in.  The top does fit nicely, the rest is a godawful mess.  Draping?  Nope- great elephant-man lumps and bulges [that’s just me, but the dress too] sticking out at random angles, no way to produce an attractively draped silhouette from this. [Plus the exposed belly, ew.]

The ‘dress’ has prevailed.  I lose.

I toyed with the idea of filling in those bloody cut outs with the jersey, and seeing if anything can be salvaged, but right now, that just feels likely to waste two lengths of fabric.  the linen is loss enough.

DO NOT MUTTER TO ME ABOUT TOILES!

I did the maths, the pattern is a load of crap.

I think there are a few issues:

In all the videos I saw, way more yardage is used, often a full width of fabric front and back.  I saw this, and obeyed the instructions.  8m of fabric would be very heavy and cumbersome to my mind…

When you do paper engineering, you can scale up many models, but only to a certain size, where the weight of the paper itself becomes an obstacle, and gravity beats you.  I think here, the size of the circles may well have an upper limit, beyond which you just get fabric so twisted you just cannot get a garment out of it.  Bearing in mind you don’t even need to go through the bloody things, I didn’t need to cut out such large holes.

I suspect that if you are above size 12, you should not attempt this without being prepared to go for two full widths of 60″ fabric, and cutting it good and long.  I would suggest making pleats where two circles WOULD meet, and just stitching  a small circle through all layers, cutting it away afterwards, then step by step increasing the size of the hole until critical mass/warp is reached.  I know what I mean.

Also, DO NOT cut out all 12 circles.  None of the examples shown in the videos use so many, usually only one or two.  Maybe this is why the pattern is called the ‘smaller’ dress?  There isn’t enough bloody fabric left to drape round a chicken leg, let alone  a stout Fairy.