Birgitta Helmersson ZW dress pattern review

 This has been on my list for so long, and the fabric has been allocated to it, which I believe is a Meet Milk viscose.  Recent success buoyed me onward. I hate making zero waste things.  I need a lot of prompting.  I just so dislike measuring fabric on the floor and cutting it without pattern pieces.  I also feel like the end results are often shapeless dresses that suit larger women with curves and are uncomfortably airy on me.  

I'm going to cut to the most important part here. My fabric was chosen long ago and the vision was deeply embedded in my brain.  The designer notes in passing that the width of the fabric matters, but mainly to say it should be 140 cm wide, not to comment closely on how much that matters.  I absolutely needed to make this from a 115 cm wide fabric.  I recommend doing so to anyone who is a size US 6 or below.  My fabric just happened to be 150 cm wide and it's devastating, because all the effort gone into sewing this project is wasted as I need to be about 6 sizes larger to suit my dress.  

I suffered through the cutting and indeed, I had no leftover scraps except those ridiculous side-hem triangles.  Those are a joke right?  Who is actually going to randomly sew on a triangle to the side seam?

I made the version with the button bodice but no buttons on the skirt. Can't be bothered with that. 

I lengthened the bodice by 1" which was totally silly.  I shortened the hem by 15 cm which was a good starting point - it was below knee/calf length but had a very high low hem when worn by me.  I ended up snipping off the hem until it hung more or less evenly.  

I made the bodice which was fine, forgot the interfacing for the front button band.  This is bad as it carries a lot of weight.  I recommend interfacing it quite heavily.  

The sleeve, when loosely pinned on, came to my wrist, no thanks!  I put the sleeves aside for later 

The pocket situation was also off-putting. I ended up using my leftover pieces from part of the sleeves to make Bardon pockets (still the best ever) and just applied them as to any skirt.  

I put on the dress to even the hem, then still did a deep 2" hem, which caused some headaches due to the curves.  I can call it a success: there is nothing visible on the outside!  And it gives it a bit more weight. 

For the sleeves I ended up just double folding in the seam allowance at the top of the bodice, and did not put any sleeves on.  It's so very wide on me it already is like having half length sleeves.  

 

Despite trying quite hard to personalise the fit on this dress, it needs to find a new owner who is a lot wider than I am.  I do think it's a beautiful concept and the gathered skirt hangs and swishes really nicely.  I don't even have a suitable person in my usual recipient group, so it may be off to the secondhand shop, sadly.  The people who have successfully made this and posted on Instagram have had a few things in their favour: they are very tall, so they can make a longer length to balance the width, and they have used narrow fabrics.     

Adventures with Alabama Chanin, part 1.

This took a long time for me to commit to.
When I first saw Carolyn's Alabama Chanin projects, I was kind of like ew, why would you spend so much time on one or two things??  Then at some point I got two Alabama Studio books, one for me and one for my mother.  I'm not sure which came first, but I bought the book for myself when I realised the base patterns that come with the book are really simple.  I wasn't convinced about hand sewing, but I certainly could use the patterns!

More recently I realised one reason hand sewing felt out of reach is because I have no faith in my ability to do it, so I also got the Alabama Chanin hand sewing manual. I thought that having it lying around increased my chances of actually learning to hand stitch and the book does have more detail than the design books. 

Recently, in a totally random burst of enthusiasm, I got a few of the patterns printed out. I have the Alabama Studio Sewing Patterns book.  The printing was quite a bit of effort. The patterns are on a CD.  They are unstandard paper sizes.  My local print shop is very friendly with me due to my frequent A0 service, but for this one I had to stand around the computer while they pulled up the patterns on CAD and fitted them to printable sheets.  So if I have one beef, it's that the patterns should be available for A0 and A4 printing.  The A line dress was so wide that we ended up turning it sideways and printing it across three sheets or something crazy like that.

Unfortunately I was sort of guessing which patterns I wanted, so I ended up with the skirt, the corset, and the A line dress, though I wasn't interested in the dress particularly.

During my recent and amazingly timed trip to the States, I bought a bunch of supplies from Alabama Chanin itself!  I got three colours of organic cotton and the button craft thread that is so highly touted.  Plus I got to do all the prewashing and drying at my parents house, such a luxury!

Now I wish I had bought more thread - I've sourced one place in Australia that sells it too, but they are sold out and seem to depend on infrequent restocking. Also New Zealand is many months behind on receipt of international parcels...

My first project was the A line dress.  I don't really like the green fabric I ended up with, but I thought if I liked the top I'd wear it, and if not I can always give it away.  I wanted to see whether the size chart fit was good for me.  I also wanted a no stress chance to try out the hand sewing.  I cut it in an M, which matches me on the size chart pretty exactly.  I did all the seams on my overlocker.  I top stitched and did the bands by hand, learning as I went along, and I'm happy with the result and getting better at the Cretan stitch.

But: I really don't like this trapeze fit.

Putting the top on for the photos I can see that it fits nicely in the back.  I could certainly play around with this pattern - removing a lot of the trapeze from the front to see if I like it more that way - but I'm planning to make the less flared dress next and so I'll probably leave this one for now.

I moved onto the corset.
I was really excited by the corset!  So excited that I made three in one day!
First, size M, 2 layers.  The problems were - generally too big, gaping in the front, needs the shoulder adjustment, and about 1" too long in the waist.

Because the pieces are so small, and overlocking is so easy, I went straight into version 2: single layer, size S, with the shoulder adjustment and 1/2" removed at the waist.  There are no lengthen shorten lines, so basically I removed length right above the narrowest part of the waist.

My enthusiastic shoulder shortening brought the armhole up a bit too close, and there's still a lot of pooling in the back, but I thought there's also still pooling in the front, so I went onto version 3: Size S, 2 layers, with the shoulder shortened only on the front, and with 1" from the waist.  I'm happy with this version!  Enough that I'm committed to the hand sewing.

Still had to think about how to finish the first two corsets, which, while modelling, I realised aren't that bad after all and do deserve lives as clothing.  I decided to just add normal bindings and I topstitched the seam allowances down.  It was absolute luck that I had an abundance of rib jersey in the exact matching shade.  

Number 1, with green lining, size M:

Number 2, single layer, size S:

This has totally whetted my appetite for more Alabama Chanin. As I get better at hand sewing, and watching my corset come together, it's interesting to see how the item becomes emotional because you have invested more into it!  I'm debating ways of using 2-layer jersey that don't involve an airbrush gun or flower designs. More adventures to follow...