After finishing the baste stitching on the final pattern and trying the dress on, I discovered that the flare at the bottom of the dress is more prominent on one side. This means that there is more fabric on one side of the dress and the seams are not quite right. So, I decided to pull out all of the baste stitching and start again from scratch.

Since both pattern pieces match up evenly and the mistake was made in the pinning process, I did not need to rework the final pattern. To make pinning the dress around the form a bit easier this time, I started out by pinning the front and back panels to each other on all seams. After balancing the material out, draping the sides and finishing pinning, I baste stitched the seams again. I tried the dress on and it appears that the seams are matched up evenly this time. The fit is good and the bottom of the dress flows beautifully when I walk.

Once I was happy with the fit, I put the pattern back on the dress form and stylized the armhole. The armhole turned out to be one of my favorite parts of the dress and it wasn’t even in the original sketch! It dips down underneath the armpit and shows enough skin to look sexy chic and not too over the top. I also started on the pattern for the shell shape that will cover the right breast by cutting a large enough piece of muslin and attaching interfacing in the middle for stiffness. Unfortunately, the stiffness is not enough to hold the material up (the material is pinned to the form in the photo) so I am looking into other options. I read about using pellon interfacing for extreme stiffness and decided to explore that as an option…

My main goal with this dress right now is to combine the top and bottom pieces into one solid pattern. I pinned the top front and bottom front pieces together then removed all of the baste stitching. After ironing out the pinned pattern pieces, I pinned them to muslin. I cut out two panels from the muslin for the front and back panels. The solid pattern looks very obvious and I’m assuming that there is an easier way to do this eliminating a few steps for future reference.

After cutting out the pieces, I strategically pinned them together on the dress form. It worked! The two solid panels work just as well as when it was four pieces (top, bottom, front and back). I started to baste stitch the top and shoulder seams and will finish the rest tomorrow for a final fitting. Then it’s on to fabric shopping!