Rooibos Muslin

Hooray - I finished my Rooibos muslin yesterday. Although I have a love-hate relationship with muslins, I knew that this one would be worthwhile to make. I figured I would have to do a small bust adjustment (SBA) and perhaps lengthen the skirt since I’m taller than average. The muslin was going to be useful to figure out exactly how big an adjustment I needed to make in those areas. Unfortunately, it seems more complicated than that! As you can see in the picture above, I have pins everywhere! Well, actually it’s a bit hard to see all the pins in that bad picture, but take my word for it. 

First, the straps were too short, holding the entire dress up at what felt like around my chin. So I let those seams out and patched to give me the length I needed to continue on. Next, I couldn’t pin the side seam closed at the top because it was too tight. So I patched that as well to give me the room I needed. The straps felt like they were going to fall right off my shoulders and I had some vertical bagginess in the bust and chest area. I pinned that out as well, and things were starting to feel better. Then I dealt with the skirt, which felt huge, even when I sat down. So I did some sitting and standing to figure out how much excess to pin out along the sides there. Finally, I did some note taking on my muslin to indicate that I want to add 3” to the skirt length to give me a skirt that ends at about knee level. The final, pinned product feels okay, but I’m a bit unsure on where to proceed from here. 

I cut this pattern at a size 2 for the top and midriff pieces. Then I tapered from a 2 to an 8 in short order for the skirt. I did that against my better judgment because I know the lines on this dress don’t correspond to the waistline, meaning I knowingly increased the skirt size too quickly up top (it should taper more slowly to a bigger size). Still, I didn’t want to make the entire thing in a 2, because it wouldn’t fit in the hips according to the measurements, but an 8 seemed giant in the bust and waist. Given the huge skirt, the 8 still seems too big, but I’m wondering about a couple options as my next step. Clearly I have to make another muslin, but do I try making the whole thing in a size 4 or 6? Or do I work with the adjustments I’ve made already for my funky sized pattern? And how do I deal with those vertical lines I pinned out of the bodice area? I don’t know what that indicates or exactly how to fix it.

Clearly I’m going to need to do some research over the weekend. 

Drat! I’ve heard so much about how easy Colette Patterns are, I really hoped for pretty simple alterations. I didn’t expect the shortness everywhere I’d encounter in this pattern. Eep! Oh well! Live and learn. It was certainly easy to put together and well explained.

In any case, this muslin was actually rather fun to make. Besides enjoying sewing something for me again (even if it isn’t the final product I would wear), I had fun using what I had to make this work. I bought what ended up being a sheet from a thrift shop a couple of weeks ago with the idea of using it to make the muslin for this dress. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see that someone else had used part of the sheet to sew something up too because a big chunk was missing. Not a big deal except that I was just a tiny bit short on fabric for one of the pieces. I didn’t really want to deal with getting out a new piece of junk fabric and figuring out what would work, so instead I just used masking tape to tape a scrap on to fill in the corner I was missing on one side. 

Yeah, masking tape. Awesome.

I also had to fudge a bit with the pieces because, as I mentioned above, I decided to taper the skirt from a size 2 to size 8 to fit my hips (I may be slender, but I still have the pear shape of my family apparently). On one piece I messed that up a little and cut a piece too short at the top because I was cutting at the size 2, when I needed the length of the size 8. I know that doesn’t make a ton of sense, but suffice it to say that the tape came out again and Swedish tracing paper filled in the gaps. It might look ugly, but it serves the purpose! 

In any case, I’m ready to do some research and figure this one out!