Thursday, March 19, 2009

A lovely dress that I won't get to wear until next summer

There have been quite a few hitches with the dress I've been working on for the last 2-3 months. That's right, the Burda EASY dress that I downloaded the sewing pattern off the Burda website for free.

The latest hitch is the sleeves. They were supposed to be easy, short, puffy sleeves, finished with elastic. Supposed to be. First of all, I questioned the length of elastic the instruction sheet told me to cut. There was no way that 13 centimetres of elastic would completely wrap around my upper arm - even when fully stretched! True, I have fallen victim to that thing called "wings", which women are apparently prone to get once they get into their late 30's (unless she is Madonna). But surely "fit" young things i.e. models, don't have upper arms that are only 13 cm in circumference?

Anyway, I put in twice the length of elastic that was called for, and it still didn't really work because the sleeves were so short. They basically ended just past my big flabby armpits. So I ripped the sleeves out and haven't bothered with the dress since.

In the meantime, I started and finished a sleeveless tunic top made from ultra-thin cotton with a tribal-ly print. It looks like something that a West African woman might have made if she'd had access to a McCall's catalogue.

4 comments:

Watson Woodworth said...

Maybe the sleeves were off a child's pattern.

Violet said...

yeah...or maybe models really are that thin.

Watson Woodworth said...

Boney wimmin creep me out.
(though I hope I didn't just offend anybody out there in Blogonia)

Violet said...

we'll soon find out won't we ;-)