sewing woes

[alonewiththemoon]

Today I finally have had a chance to work on that crushed purple velvet beledi dress project I've had floating around for a while now. First problem was when I actually read through the pattern, I realized this particular dress pattern had a bra built into the dress (it's the open front kind of beledi dress). i want to be able to wear different bras with this dress, so that was a problem. I solved this problem by extending the pattern upward based on a stretchy shirt of mine. Sewed up the sides and tops of the armholes, so far so good. The open front is a bit gappy around the lower rib cage, probably because that's where the dress was intended to end, but I can always put a dart or two in.

Then came the sleeves. Argh. Someday I will realize that I am really no good at this kind of thing and just pay other people to do it for me. Again, I decided I didn't entirely like the sleeves in the pattern, so I changed them. Then once I had attached them to the dress, the shoulders would no longer stay up when I moved my arms. I did leave the underarms open, but I'm not really sure what the problem is. The sleeves aren't too tight, the arm holes are plenty big, but still there are problems. I'm thinking that I cut the back of the dress a little too wide, but that can't be the whole problem since the arm loops stayed up before I put on the sleeves. I've taken the sleeves off the dress now but I'm really at a loss for what to do. I debated modifying this into an off-the-shoulder balady dress, but that looked a little too naked (which I realize is an odd thing to say since one is more covered in a baladi dress than in bedleh, but it's all a matter of contrasts). Pinning the dress shoulders to the dance bra resulted in the predictable loss of bra straps from shoulders, so that's not a solution.

So the obvious option is ditch the sleeves and just have a sleeveless dress. But having seen it with nice drapey sleeves, I don't want to give up on them. I'm considering having the sleeves be separate pieces, held up with elastic. It would leave a bit of my upper arms bare, which might look strange (and also defeat one of the purposes of this dress, which was to have something very traditional that covered my tattoos for times when such is needed).

Well, if worse comes to worst, I can always chop the upper part of the dress off and have a lovely straight skirt, with matching drapey gauntlet sleeves no less. Sigh.

Comments

[firefly124.livejournal.com]

Hey, I'm just impressed you're trying sleeves at all! I've made one garment with sleeves, and that with an expert over my shoulder every step of the way, and definitely not something meant to be danced in.

[alonewiththemoon]

Sadly, I think I have to give up on the upper part of the dress--I did indeed make the back too wide, which makes the shoulders sit too far out, which means they are doomed to perpetually falling down, with or without sleeves. Since I already cut out the front, I no longer have the option of reworking the upper part of the dress. But, as I said, at least I will have a really nice skirt, and I will just put elastic in the top of the sleeves so that they will make coordinating gauntlets for the skirt. I guess it will still convey the same look, in a way, even if it wasn't what I wanted...

I did figure out how I made the back too wide--I continued the same trajectory of the curve up from the waist to the lower rib cage, but I didn't think about the fact that the ribs don't actually continue out at the same trajectory, otherwise we'd look like big triangles. This dress would fit a narrow-hipped football player pretty well :-(