Full Busted Onion

(I just love the name of these patterns and playing with them in my blog entry titles.)

I'm in the process of sewing up my Onion. I'm foregoing a muslin and forging ahead with the good stuff. Mostly because, truly, I have lots of good stuff and if this somehow doesn't cut it, it won't be the end of the world or even a small dent in the stash. But also because a comparison of my final pattern pieces against my TNT Ottobre tee pattern is purty darn close so I'm purty darn confident it's going to work fine.

The promised non-earth shattering FBA pics and narrative follow. Or would, if Blogger would cooperate. Grrrr. I'll come back later and update this.

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OK, Blogger is still hiccuping, but I managed to get the pics uploaded.

This is the Onion upper bust pattern, unaltered (obviously!).




I traced that and made an FBA, resulting in the dart highlighted in yellow, below.



I then slashed from the shoulder down to the bust and rotated the horizontal dart to the shoulder, which resulted in the new dart opening highlighted in yellow, below. The new dart opening on the pattern is filled in with tissue and will be sewn as gathers onto the back shoulder seam.



Next, I added the extra width needed at the sideseam to make this piece match up to the width of my Ottobre tee, and then I laid the puzzle piece of a pattern on top of a new sheet of tracing paper and traced it, adding seam allowances too. Voila! Done. The new extra length of this upper piece will be eased into the sideseam at bust level.



You'll need to click this photo so you can see the detail in the larger version. This shows my Ottobre back pattern piece under the Onion tracing. You can see (I hope) the original Onion width, and the 2" I added. The original Onion shaping is very similar to the Ottobre, with just the overall width being different. Which is to be expected since I'm wider than the largest Onion size. ;-) (The Onion XL size in inches is 42-35-46.)



If you're going to do a similar FBA for this pattern, be sure that your results for the top bodice measure 1/2" narrower than the bottom piece at the empire seam (circled in red, below). The neckband makes up for this difference.



For the sleeve, I eyeballed it using my Ottobre sleeve pattern width as a guide. It's a knit, it's forgiving, and I was too lazy to do a "proper" sleeve adjustment. This will work fine so I'm not worried about the Alterations Police hunting me down. ;-)



When I was getting ready to write the entry earlier, this is where I had stopped. You can see that my altered upper bust pieces do hit at the proper empire area, i.e., below my (Zillie's) bust. Since Blogger wasn't cooperating, I went back upstairs and continued sewing so I'm a lot further along now. I expect to finish it tonight and post a photo or two tomorrow.



Since my Ottobre tee pattern pieces were handy, after I cut out the Onion pattern, I cut out another Ottobre tee too. I'm planning to bind the neckline with the fabric in the upper left corner but it's nowhere near as bright orange as it appears here. It's more of a duller pumpkin orange. I really wanted to bind it with brown, but I think every top I've made lately has been bound with brown, including the Onion in the works, which might be verging on Too Much. Or not, since I do love them all.



And the best news is that while I've been sewing, DH has been in the garage building me a new cutting table base, with SHELVES!! Woo hoo! I don't think it will make it into the sewing room before next weekend since it will need to be painted, but it's close and I'll just have to be a little more patient.