Eura Underdress – The Family Look pt. 2

The continuation of the Eura underdress journey. (See here for previous entry.)

After much deliberation and pulling the dress off and on again I decided to take it all apart. I was right when I had assumed that the dress would wind up far to large for myself.  As a reminder I used  the pattern to the left as my starting point. After getting it three quarters done I was better able to see how it would fit and I wasn’t  liking the fit at all. The length was too long, the girth too big, and the neck line too deep. In short it was a mess.

The first thing I fixed was the neckline since that would affect the hem length and where the gores sat. You can see the dotted line in the image below from my whiteboard that the sleeve/torso base was 25 inches.  I ended up taking off 4 inches (2 off each side) so that the neckline wasn’t a plunging affair. I also took 4 inches off the top of the torso pieces because with the gores it was still too big. I’m fond of fuller skirts though so I just fudged the angle until they met again.

Next came the gores. You can see a lot of green lines on the left side of the drawing below. One of the things I noticed is that the last 10 inches or so of the gores were completely useless to sew because it just gets too narrow. My sleeve at the wrist was plenty wide as it was so I decided to end the gore just beyond my elbow. You can see that from the top to the last green horizontal mark is 70 inches. Naturally I  pinned and checked this before going further and found that the gore still made the body far to large especially when I considered adding the gore on the other side. My solution was to make sure I had enough room over the bust and just shave the gore down that way. The 16 inches running vertically is the distance from just after my elbow to my bust. The 3.5 inch measurement is what I needed for comfort in the bust after taking out 4 inches from the top of the torso pieces.

Rough draw of my own measurements (in black) and the adjustments (in green)

So after all the adjustments were done (at least the cutting bit) I sewed it all together and tried it on. It fits just about perfect. The hemming will be a bit of a pain since the sides hang longer than front and back due to the gores and how the thing is pieced together but I approximated it the best I could alone. I wore it this past weekend at Panteria and it was pretty much perfect. The gores that ended just after my elbow gave me enough room to bend my arms and over all I had a full range of motion. (Note: I’m not proportionate and have a very wide back and shoulders so this is often a problem for me.)

The next thing on my list to do is to make up a dress for my daughter in this pattern. A lot of parents swear by it since there is no underarm gore which tends to be a high stress point for growing youths. I’ll update this later with a finished picture.