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 |
Swayback adjustment spread across three points - still didn't work! |
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!
I'm sorry to hear about your fitting woes, I've just gone through a similar thing with my Thurlow shorts. I hope the construction goes well, it will look great in mustard!
ReplyDeleteWhy can't we all just be the same size, I'm sure it would be much easier!! I saw your shorts and they look great - it's worth it in the end.
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