And what this means is that a certain little lady:
...is probably out enjoying being tortured by her Papa:
Which means, I HAVE THE HOUSE TO MYSELF!!!
Which means, naturally, I lounge around said house long enough to make a giant pot of coffee, then leave the house and spend all day in the studio.
Har har.
Anyway, after a couple of hours spent watching episodes of the spin-off series hosted by various winners of HGTV's Design Star, and simultaneously taping all the pieces of my software-generated pattern together, then cutting them out with a steady hand and very sharp X-acto knife, we have this:
Voila!
Then, while watching hours of the first season of Laguna Beach: The Real O.C., I traced the completed pattern onto my extremely-suitable-for-this-project-because-it's-light-but-very-crispy-with-stabilizer muslin. And cut that out using a combination of rotary cutter and the fabric scissors my amazing mother-in-law gave me. And lamented over the fact that I think Stephen is sorta hot. And that makes me sort of gross.
Oh well!
Here's the arm piece, because I forgot to take pictures of the bodice pieces... prolly because I was grossed out with myself:
Then, while pausing episodes of HGTV's $250,000 Challenge long enough to run the sewing machine, I pieced the bodice together with contrasting thread using a basting stitch. This is actually what it looked like after a few try-ons, sorta sweaty and rumpled:
The torso fit like a glove, but there was a serious issue going on in the shoulder area. By this time, Mr. Dude had come home from dragging Pearl around the elementary school yard on a glorified noose called the "Wonder Lead" and helped me fit it a bit, so we came up with this alteration:
...about an inch taken in at the shoulders. However, Mr. Dude is deathly afraid of messing up my project and refused to do any of the cutting into this sloper that I need to do to get the fit closer to right.
Also, taking in the shoulder this much brought the armscye (better known to laymen as the arm-hole) way up and caused horizontal bunching across the chest. I'm not sure if this is the best way to alter the pattern, or if I should take in tucks across the chest and redraft with a shorter upper-torso-chest-area (I have no idea what this is called...) rather than messing with the arm-scye(hole).
Arm-si-cle.
Mmm... Popsicle.
It's hot in my studio...
Anyway, next step will be figuring out how to fit this thing to myself without Mr. Dude helping me. Hmmm... I think maybe if he can carefully pin me into it up the back I might be able to work with it by myself, but I have a feeling this is going to result in a few different versions of the sloper before it's totally dialed in. How does Gertie do it? The good thing is that once this is figured out, I'll have a custom base pattern to draft all kinds of fun stuff from. Yey!
Trudging on...
Besos,
Ms. May
