No Singing Voice Today

Somehow, I came home from Girls' Ministry camp with a cold; today is Day 4 and I'm coughing and croaking.  So no choir wardrobe post.

But I did a first pass muslin on the Vogue 1250 dress.  A friend gave me a couple of pieces of black and white knits from her stash for my birthday; I decided I'd whip up the 1250 dress from the poly matte jersey.  I expected something wearable.

Um.  Not so much.

I had some problems with the neckline/shoulder seam intersection; not quite sure what I need to do to fix it.  I see that it is designed to slash to the intersection point on the front; I think in my alterations I assumed that the cowl would wrap around w/o slashing. When I modified the cowl on the Vogue 8669  top; I did NOT need to slash the cowl facing and I tried to make the 1250 work the same way.  So I think my shoulder seam on the facing is at the wrong angle.  I need to work on that...either redraft the facing so the shoulder seam is at the correct angle or redraft the back neck so that it is wide enough that I don't have to slash it.

And my attempted correction on the underarm  to avoid the too-low lingerie flashing some of the reviewers mentioned resulted in an armhole that was downright tight.  I actually had to slash the side seam  open about an inch under the arm just to get enough ease to move (making this attempt an actual not-to-be-worn muslin), but it still felt tight going over the shoulder.  I thought I'd forgotten the square shoulder adjustment, but when I checked the pattern I saw that I did indeed do it. So I'm not sure why the top of the shoulder was pulling so badly.  I may need a hyper square shoulder adjustment here.

But even that wasn't the worst of it. The dress looked AWFUL on me.

Part of the problem may have been that the knit was a kinda beefy jersey in a kinda scratchy polyester and just didn't have the drape necessary to look good, but it emphasized all the bad things that have happened to my body since the Great Hormone Shift a couple of years ago. It wasn't tight anywhere other than the armholes, but it did some weird draping just above my upper abdomen and cupped under my lower tummy. 

It was truly scary.  Ugly.  Bad.

So I think it's going back into the envelope and back into the cabinet.  If I can get myself motivated to lose some weight, I may try it again and work on other issues, but for right now, it Just Isn't Going To Work.  Time to move on.

Sigh.