A bad marriage of fabric and pattern

Thanks everyone for the well wishes for my pregnancy! As I said before, it's so nice to be able to share it here on the blog now. sewingsue, thanks for the maternity fashion blog recommendation - I've already combed through a lot of it and I'm following it in my blog reader now. Sew4Fun, I admire your ability to sense these things; I am always late in figuring these things out about others!

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Simplicity 2754

This was supposed to be my Thanksgiving Day dress. It never quite made it to the point of being wearable.  This issue was my fabric choice.  The pattern recommends wovens or a matte jersey, the model photos clearly show fabrics with really nice drape, but I had this vision in my head that it would look fabulous made up in my Vera Wang wool jersey, and I forged ahead, despite how heavy it is. The VW wool jersey is the kind of knit that would even work well for a semi-structured garment...

I got to this point in the construction and tried the dress on. Frankly I think the photo above looks just fine. But the issue is that the fabric is so heavy, the skirt really pulls the bodice down and after a couple of minutes of moving your arms about, doing ordinary daily activities, you get something....

...like this, in which the horizontal seam is pulled down and the bust darts just look hideous. *shudder*  I made a 12, thinking I'd need the room to grow, but maybe a smaller size would have been better? Who knows. I left it alone for about a week, wondering how I might be able to salvage it, and in the end, I decided a drastic measure was called for, and I ended up....

...with this!  It's my TNT t-shirt pattern.  I turned it into a basic, crewneck sweater.

The dress sleeves were 2-piece with a seam along the outside of the arm, so in order to reuse the sleeves, I had to keep that long outside seam, which I think makes for a neat design feature.  I added "cuffs" to the sleeves to get them to a nice length just past my wrists.

 

Same thing goes for the back - the dress back had a center back seam (into which I think you were supposed to insert a zipper), so now my crewneck sweater has a CB seam too. 

I had a couple of questions on how I use the fusible knit hem tape that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. It's very simple really but easier to explain with pictures than words. First I fuse the interfacing to the very bottom of my hem on the wrong side of the fabric.

The hem tape is 1.25" wide, and I press the hem up just 1" wide, so that the interfacing is in the fold of the hem; this provides extra stability and helps the garment hem wear better/longer.

Now stitch the hem with your preferred method.  Here I just used two rows of parallel stretch stitch on my sewing machine.

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I'm out the rest of the week for a quick trip to Germany! I'll be in Munich and near Stuttgart. Plenty of pics to come. Have a great week!