SWAY! so hypnotic! SWAY! so hypnotic!

(Alright, we've gone a bit left field with the song lyric titling today. Let's see what the Venn diagram of "people interested in sewing patterns" and "teenage Goths in the late 90s" looks like.)

As I mentioned in my summer plans, my original intention was to make the Papercut Sway dress using the raspberry linen I bought on my trip to Mood last month. Being that it was a memento of a lovely holiday and as such not replaceable, I didn't want to just cut into it without checking the pattern would actually work for me, so I went out for toile fabric. I came back with some light pink floral crepe and a very confused face. Why did I buy light pink floral? Did something terrible happen to Teen Goth Jen?

It turns out that I actually don't hate it. I think the print is bold and saturated enough to take the attention away from the pink (which is a much brighter candyfloss sort of colour IRL, when the sun isn't misbehaving like this). It's another Fabric Store in Walthamstow find; lightweight with a slight crepey texture, and also a borderline confusing lack of fraying. I haven't hemmed it yet in these pictures, I've worn it out of the house unhemmed, and after more than a week there's maybe one visible loose thread. What kind of wizardry this is, I do not know.

As you might imagine, this pattern is super-easy to construct. The main body of the dress is made up of four pieces, plus an all-in-one facing, side seam pockets and a waist tie. It was a couple of hours' work at most. The bias on this one drops like WHOA, though, so it needs a fair amount of time to hang before being levelled off and hemmed. I'm actually not sure I'm going to level this off - I didn't compensate for my boobs when cutting it out, and though the shorter length at the front is fine for me, the same length at the back would be way less comfortable. I think I'll just make sure the sides are even and pretend it's an intentional high-low hem.

So, the fit. For me personally, the shoulder fit and neckline style on this dress isn't quite right. The dress is meant to be reversible, but I tried it on with the round neck at the front and it's so uncomfortable that I can't even wear it that way for a photo. I'm not sure why this is. The V neck side is fine, but also I am really not keen on the proportions. I feel like it needs to be either lower or wider or both. Not in a cleavagey way, either, just... this is too small. I think the Cashmerette Webster (which might be what my linen ends up as), for example, has a lovely size and shape of V neck without entering into the whole boob question at all. If I were ever to try making this dress again, I'd probably try and put that neckline on it.

Also, this is a bit more of a quibble, but I found the length of the waist tie slightly weird. It comfortably wraps my waist one and a half times, meaning it's too long for a normal tie and too short for a double wrap. When I wear this dress I put the waist tie in backwards, so that it wraps at the back and comes back round to tie in the front.

The combination of my exaggerated body shape and the excess of fabric means it doesn't look quite as relaxed on me as I would have liked. It's almost a circle skirt vibe, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but also isn't really what I was after. This fabric is lighter weight than my linen, and I really think it would look too bulky on me. So I'm glad I made this test version first, but also annoyed because I now have zero idea of what the linen should become. I'm considering the Webster, but worried that's too far in the other direction volume-wise. Easy unfitted summer dress pattern that works with waist ties? Help me out here? 

(It has to be said, though, that I've been very grateful for this dress during our current stupid heatwave.)

I'm not sure what's up next. I haven't sewn very much this past week; a combination of the heatwave, a fabric order not being what I expected when it turned up and an exceptionally brutal beginner weightlifting class which replaced my quads with metal rods have meant that my sewjo is sitting in the corner weeping into a motorised fan. Fingers crossed this week will be less designed to hurt me!