Well. Don't like it.

The bodice is Simplicity 9153, which I've used many times (I'm wearing a dress made with it now), and I like the individual fabrics, and I like the way they combine when next to each other, but, overall...no. It's incredibly Not Me.

 

 

mumble

 So I've wanted to revisit Simplicity 8241 from 1987--I don't have my own photo of the pattern envelope, and I don't particularly want to take one at the moment.  There are two listings for it on eBay right now, so I borrowed this from one of those

My copy is in size 8, which was fine when I first acquired and made it (for the only time) over 20 years ago.  No so much now.

Earlier in the week, I had pulled a piece of red and black and white plaid fabric--cotton, not quite coarse enough to be homespun, but not really lightweight enough for me to want to go ahead and make it into another try at a buttoned shirt with a scoop neckline instead of a collar, with no print mixing.  The fabric was also 36", so I would not have been able to eke out even the tiny sleeves. So. No shirt from that fabric.

But, I got it in my mind that I absolutely would use that fabric next. And eventually I thought, hey, I could mix prints with it after all.  Maybe a skirt?  Tiered, with each tier in a separate fabric? ...or...gored...with the fabric mixed across gores...  And that led back to Simplicity 8241.

Which I didn't exactly use.  It's a twelve gore skirt, and there are six separate pattern pieces for those  twelve gores.  I didn't wanna deal with that.  I dug out the back center piece and cut 12 of those, adding some extra width to the top, as well as shortening it by two inches from the top.

Yeah, in retrospect: bad idea.

I knew one fabric I wanted to use with the plaid, but needed another to be able to make everything.  Meh, I have a lot of cloth, I'll find something good.

Hey, guess what?  I did not find something good.  I did find something adequate, and I sewed it all together, but...I'm not happy about it.

Grayyyyyyyy

The return (somewhat) of cooler weather + PMS made me say "Heyyy, I wanna sew some mori kei layers to wear under the dresses I've been sewing."  The PMS also conspired to make me ignore the fact that I dislike sewing thin synthetic knits and so decide to purchase a 4-yard-for-$4 dark gray thin synthetic knit precut at Walmart.

The first thing I wanted to try sewing from that knit was a pair of leggings, using the leggings pattern I cobbled together years ago from an old copy of Simplicity 9721 that I haven't owned for years.  Considering how much disappointment came from the last time I tried a different leggings pattern, and also considering that there were four yards of 56" fabric to experiment with, I figured I should at least try it, since the last pair of leggings I had made with it are things I still wear. (And I seem to have made them before starting this blog.)  Now, though, those were made with a 4-way stretch, and extending the waistline up by 5" created enough room to comfortably encompass all of my diastasis recti bulge mom belly.  The dark gray thin synthetic is only a 2-way stretch,and the 5" extra made it enough to go aaaaabooouuut halfway up the bulge, and also not quite all the way to the ankles

Yes, that's a picture of them hanging awkwardly on a hanger, which doesn't exactly illustrate the fit issues.  I'm wearing them now and my ankles are a bit cold.  The waist band doesn't seem like it's going to be an issue, in terms of comfort.  The main thing will be to see how bad the knee and posterior fabric growth will be by the end of the day, since 2-way stretch just doesn't have the recover that 4-way has.

Still, I considered that pair of leggings enough of a success to go ahead and try to use up all the rest of the fabric in another project, the success of which is still TBD