Frankenpattern - Anise fitting

Ooops - sorry guys. Im not sure if you've noticed but the weather over the last few weeks has been A-mazing which has meant total blog silence whilst I captured as much sun as possible. Fortunately, it's all over now and it's pouring with rain as I type!

Before my sunshine hiatus, I had finally started my Anise jacket from Colette. I have been dying to get stuck into this for ages but couldn't find the fabric I wanted so the pattern sat on the shelf for a while. Then on a recent trip to London I found some mustard cotton (I've decided it's like a brushed flannel) that was perfect. Then rather annoyingly I went on the Birmingham meet-up the next day and found some Mustard garbadine for half the price - damn you Barry's Fabrics! It turns out mustard fabric is like busses...

According to the pattern I am a 4 in the bust and a 6 everywhere else. I laboriously traced off the pattern in a 6, no harm in a bit of extra room up top I thought. I then proceeded to make toile no.1. The pattern went together fine and I set in both sleeves so I could see how it was sitting. Well. The answer is not good, the jacket was about 4 inches off even nearly meeting across the bust, I couldn't move my arms and there was serious wrinkling in the back.

This story could take some time but I can see you're already falling asleep so to cut a long story short about 5 toiles later I gave up most of fitting efforts and cut. Watch this space to see how that works out.

In brief, the first thing I did was a 2" FBA, it's taken me a long time to get my head around why I need to do this as I have fairly small boobs but have to do this a adjustment a fair bit so I'm guessing it's something to do with my back. I also did a 1cm forward shoulder a 1/2cm broad back adjustment a la Fit for Real People to give a bit more room for arm movement. These two adjustments were fine, it was the swayback that was the killer. After doing the massive FBA I could have shoved a cushion up the back of the jacket. Pinning out the excess horizontally worked a dream and the toile looked ace, however I was pinching out around 3" and transferring this to the pattern just did not work. It turned out something like this...

One huge swayback adjustment

This obviously didn't work as it added in a huge amount of extra fabric at the centre back. I read that you shouldn't do more than a 2cm swayback adjustment so I tried to spread it out across three smaller areas but that didn't work either.

Swayback adjustment spread across three points - still didn't work!

In the end I gave up and left in a single 1" swayback adjustment and went for it. However, with the incredible heat I couldn't bring myself to sit inside and make a jacket so it's still sitting there waiting for some bound buttonholes to appear.

Apologies for the lack of fitting pictures, it was far too stressful to be taking photos. By way of apology here is a picture of some cakes I made for my amazing friends' wedding a couple of weeks ago!