We have a dress...

 Finally met up with the bridesmaid today and got the cobbled up dress on her...it's not a beautiful fit, but the zipper zips  without threat of malfunctioning so we're calling it good, lol.  All I have to do now is whip down the lining to the waistband and we are DONE....with that one.  That will likely be my busy hands task whilst I watch my kid the video streamer (yeah, that's what the Actor is up to these days) on Saturday.

Meantime, I'm working on my dress.  I finally decided to go with Butterick 6660 , a Connie Crawford pattern, as it looked floaty and swishy and wouldn't need much in the way of alterations.  The listed finished pattern measurements (you have to look on the actual pattern for those) put me in a Large, but I didn't want to charge into uncharted waters with my good fabric. So I pulled the last dress muslin I made out of a box and recut it into a muslin of the waist-up portion of the B 6660.  I knew from my measurements that I needed to drop the bust point a generous inch, so I did that on the tracing.  I wasn't fond of the sleeve on the picture;  it looked more fitted and kinda casual, so I found a sleeve with some funky pleating to try from a different Butterick pattern and traced the armsceye from that pattern onto this one.  I also rounded off the point of the V neck, raising that nearly 2".  But, in terms of alterations, that was it.

Made up the muslin to the sleeves...with a trick; I sewed up the back seam, where the zipper will go, and added a seam allowance to the front fold line and cut the front as two pieces so I could pin that up...which is a heckin' lot easier if you don't have a sewing buddy to close up the back for you.  Anyway,  I made up the sleeves first and decided I didn't like them much but thought I'd go ahead and see what they looked like. However, sewing up the sideseams showed that the front armsceye was a good half to three-quarters inch higher than the back armsceye at the side seam.  Plus the shoulders were way wider than my narrow frame.  I stopped there, went upstairs and unpicked everything, decided to go with a different sleeve...one I thought would be a looser sleeve than the one that came on 6660, and had an extremely frustrating time trying to figure out why, when everything lined up, the moment I pivoted the front and back armsceye to remove that excess in the shoulder the front ended up hiked up above the back again.  I finally decided to kind of average the top of that seam and take the change out of the sleeve ease.  I cut the new sleeves out of the old sleeves and sewed everything back up.

The shoulder was still too wide.  And the sleeves were not as generous and ease-y as I thought they were.  I pulled out the original B6660 sleeves and found that, despite the snug look on the envelope, they were actually going to be a looser fit than the ones I had substituted.  So I put all the other-pattern-sleeves up, whacked back the shoulder seam at the armsceye with the help of a french curve, then checked to make sure I still had some ease in the sleeve cap and called it good.

Tomorrow I'll trace the rest of the pattern and maybe even get my dress cut out.

Whilst I do laundry.

I may have one other dress to hem...if it comes in time.  We have a backup if it doesn't, but of course we want the actual dress that was ordered.

Dunno if I will get any housecleaning done before the out of town folks arrive, but hopefully we will all be dressed for the wedding...