Third place

My dress made it to 3rd place in the Pattern Review contest. Thank you if you voted for me. It was special to read the comments on it. All the nice comments either here or on PR made me blush. I wore the dress to a dinner last week and it was very comfortable. It was also great fun to make and see it turn out the way it did. There is another knock off dress in drafting process, hope to make it in the next weeks.

Anne said in a comment “I understood that you can't just add sleeves to a sleeveless garment so is this drafted specifically to take sleeves”. That in general is true: a sideseam for a dress with sleeves is a bit shorter (and the armhole deeper) than a sleeveless dress. When drafting a sloper for a sleeveless dress in the drafting system I use also a little less ease is used than in a sloper used for a dress with sleeves. Not a lot (2 cm in total circumference for a fitted bodice), but still. I don’t know whether this works the same in all drafting systems, it’s the way I learned it. I think you can add sleeves to a sleeveless garment if you deepen the armhole a bit.

To conclude the posts on this dress a few pictures explaining how I drafted the lines in the pattern.

In the first picture you see a part of the skirt (right hip to be exact) with the dart.

When folding the dart closed, the lines of the pattern piece are not straight any more.

The last step was make a straight line again en marking the lines that now have to be ignored. It’s making calls of judgement all the time, because some space is take and added at various places. I had to decide whether that could be done or not without affecting the fit. That’s the reason I did not take out the bust or vertical back darts, it simply could not be done.

Two conclude two detail pictures.