Dress Diary: Sture Doublet - Muslin Mockup
I'm making a Sture outfit for thirteenletters, and it's not going well yet.
Normally, when I sew, I apply fabric to the end wearer, and remove what isn't the garment in question. I decided to use a paper pattern for this particular outfit--Reconstructing History's 506, informed by Janet Arnold's take on the same outfit--and I feel I'm way outside my comfort zone. I have several problems in this garment so far that tell me I simply do not grok what's going on.
Way out here so far it looks fine. I can adjust the center front seam around thirteenletters' actual shape when I see him again; the wings over the sleeves look fine; the collar looks like it stands the way it's supposed to.
But once I get below the arms, it all starts to go pear-shaped. Admittedly, this is very likely to be my fault. The original outfit was shaped with a great deal of taper in the torso, and thirteenletters is simply not shaped like that. So, as he had the same problem with fit as Svante Sture, the original garment's owner, seems to have had, I tried to solve the problem using the same technique. In the original coat, there was a small panel added right under the arm to accommodate extra width, and so this is where I ended up adding a bit of extra room to make sure the waist measurement would fit. I definitely anticipated problems in having done this without understanding intimately the pattern as written, but I figured I could probably fudge it. The issues currently in the mockup are way beyond fudging room.
To begin with, the front panel seems to be way longer than the back.
The sleeve, also, has turned out to be rather smaller than the armscye, though more by a dimension on the scale of the disparity between the length of the front and back panels, and less like the 1.5 cm adjustment I did to the waist.
Am wondering if I didn't piece it together correctly, or if I'm not taking into account the correct seam allowance (the pattern never mentioned at all whether seam allowance was included, which I thought odd--I didn't end up adding any extra, as laurensa and I both agreed that it looked like it was already included), or what. I obviously have a serious error, though.
The only minor weirdness so far seems to be in the pointiness of the front tabs. I honestly thought they might have gone on backwards, but referring to Janet Arnold makes it look like they're on the right direction, if a little pointy.
The original tabs do seem to have had much less of a point, but I'll check to see how the center seam lies on thirteenletters before I snip anything off.
Overall, I think it'll work if I can figure out what I've done wrong with the major errors. I just hope I figure it out before Tuesday night, as Wednesday-Friday I won't have time to sew and next weekend I'll actually be fewer than 500 miles away to do a proper fitting, and I'd really like for the pieces to go together before I attack thirteenletters with fabric and pins.
Normally, when I sew, I apply fabric to the end wearer, and remove what isn't the garment in question. I decided to use a paper pattern for this particular outfit--Reconstructing History's 506, informed by Janet Arnold's take on the same outfit--and I feel I'm way outside my comfort zone. I have several problems in this garment so far that tell me I simply do not grok what's going on.
Way out here so far it looks fine. I can adjust the center front seam around thirteenletters' actual shape when I see him again; the wings over the sleeves look fine; the collar looks like it stands the way it's supposed to.
But once I get below the arms, it all starts to go pear-shaped. Admittedly, this is very likely to be my fault. The original outfit was shaped with a great deal of taper in the torso, and thirteenletters is simply not shaped like that. So, as he had the same problem with fit as Svante Sture, the original garment's owner, seems to have had, I tried to solve the problem using the same technique. In the original coat, there was a small panel added right under the arm to accommodate extra width, and so this is where I ended up adding a bit of extra room to make sure the waist measurement would fit. I definitely anticipated problems in having done this without understanding intimately the pattern as written, but I figured I could probably fudge it. The issues currently in the mockup are way beyond fudging room.
To begin with, the front panel seems to be way longer than the back.
The sleeve, also, has turned out to be rather smaller than the armscye, though more by a dimension on the scale of the disparity between the length of the front and back panels, and less like the 1.5 cm adjustment I did to the waist.
Am wondering if I didn't piece it together correctly, or if I'm not taking into account the correct seam allowance (the pattern never mentioned at all whether seam allowance was included, which I thought odd--I didn't end up adding any extra, as laurensa and I both agreed that it looked like it was already included), or what. I obviously have a serious error, though.
The only minor weirdness so far seems to be in the pointiness of the front tabs. I honestly thought they might have gone on backwards, but referring to Janet Arnold makes it look like they're on the right direction, if a little pointy.
The original tabs do seem to have had much less of a point, but I'll check to see how the center seam lies on thirteenletters before I snip anything off.
Overall, I think it'll work if I can figure out what I've done wrong with the major errors. I just hope I figure it out before Tuesday night, as Wednesday-Friday I won't have time to sew and next weekend I'll actually be fewer than 500 miles away to do a proper fitting, and I'd really like for the pieces to go together before I attack thirteenletters with fabric and pins.