First Impression

Boy, this looks terrible in the photo, even for a muslin. But the neckline seam allowance is still on the top so it was really hard to get it onto Zillie. And apparently my pinning-evenly skills were sorely lacking this morning. (Speaking of Zillie, I really need to spend an hour with her getting her back to matching me. As she is right now, she really only matches me in the bust.)



While my bust is low thanks to gravity, the black dots are not marking the bust points. Those were my quick marks for pivot points when sewing the pieces together. The underbust seaming really is symetrical and would be in the photos if I had taken more time to smooth things out before pinning. Oh well. I'm not going for perfection here. It's really just to let you all know that I am actually making some progress on this. ;-)

I haven't actually officially tried it on me yet. I went to my sewing room before hitting the shower the morning and so the girls aren't properly supported yet. I did quickly put it on over my PJs and the circumferences seem to be OK, so fingers crossed that it won't need too much tweaking overall once I'm wearing a bra. (That's TMI, isn't it?) But my general impression is that it's going to work.

For the heck of it, I timed myself from pattern sheets fresh off the printer (fresh meaning 4 days ago!), through taping them together, cutting them out, and then cutting the muslin. I know that one concern about pattern software is "taping all those sheets together."

I had a total of 21 sheets of letter-size paper (similar to A4 for non-U.S. readers). It took me 8 minutes to align and tape the sheets together to form my complete pattern pieces. Yes, 8 minutes. It takes me longer than that to unfold and press pattern tissue and then wrestle what I'm not using back into the envelope.

Here's what the layout looks like before it prints. The yellow shows the pages that I've selected to print so I don't end up printing blank pages which would have nothing on them but a footer and alignment marks.



After taping the pattern together, it took another 5 minutes to cut out the individual pieces with a rotary cutter. Then another 10-15 to cut out the muslin. And finally, about 30 minutes to sew it all together, including changing my threads to use up non-matching, nearly-empty bobbins and pressing seams as I went. So, about an hour from print to muslin. Yes, I have practice because I've been taping sheets together for a while now. But it never has taken that long or been a major drag. I still haven't sewn a sleeve or the collar area, which I intend to do, but that won't take very long either since it's just a muslin and it doesn't have to be pretty.

Carolyn, of course you can have a copy of this pattern. But keep in mind what you'll be getting! It will be worse than a BWOF pattern. There are no notches on my "custom" pieces and some of the curves I drew I just smoothed/trued when I cut instead of fighting with the limited curve drawing tools in the software. Which means they will look rough on paper.

Parting shot: Remember DS's jeans that I patched the other day, except for the back pocket per his request? Well, this is how they came home yesterday. Ahem. Maybe sometimes mother does know best?? ;-)