There will be no heroic and proud post today. The words do not flow freely from my keyboard. I must fight to write them down. I would rather run to the sewing machine and try to fix my mistake, but on the same time I am not sure I will be able to achieve the same nice fit again….
But back to the beginning.

Perhaps you remember my post about Maastricht and the amazing bookstore in a cathedral (if not here are some more photos, I could not resist :-D) I bought a book full of sewing patterns for dresses which I was eager to try out. Over the last weeks I worked on the Eden dress from La Maison Victor. I found a lovely fabric I wanted to use. It’s again from the famous scrap box of the nearest fabric store, so I had to improvise with the cutting – the pattern may not have the same direction on skirt and body…. ?
The fabric is a very stretchy but thick jersey and I love the festive lace like pattern. Because of the stretchiness I modified the dress a bit: I omitted the buttonband on the backside and I made the neckline a bit more modest. On the photos the Eden dress seems to be worn with negative ease, so another modification had to be done; I combined different sizes. I have very thick arms and do not like narrow sleeves or even worse a narrow fit at the armpits. Therefore, I used size 46 for the sleeves and armholes and size 44 for the rest of the dress. I also pondered to shortens the body at the back, but then decided to do this on the fabric.

So far all went well. I sewed the body together and miraculously the bust darts sit on the right place and the sleeve width is to my liking. Highly motivated (planning another dress, pondering making a shirt with the body pattern, imagining myself on Christmas with this wonderful handmade dress) I sat down and calculated a sway back adjustment. At the middle of the back I included a kind of lengthwise dart with the biggest height in the middle (5 cm). Merrily I pinned the skirt onto the body and sewed both parts together. And as I am soooooo clever (irony) I used a straight stitch instead of a zig-.zag stitch, so that it would be easy to unpick the seam if the fit is not to my liking. And it was not. You can see it for yourself on the photos

In my defense I had headaches on this day of skirt attaching….
I had a look at the photos and thought the low waist ugly. I should have shortened the body about 6 cm or even more. And in my inattentive headache sewing I also made the seam much to small, so that the selvedge of the fabric was visible on the right site. I was not happy. And with the headaches getting stronger I wanted this to be out of the way. I ripped it open. Fast… you remember I made this easy to rip seam.

On the next day with my headaches lesser, I send the photos of the skirt to Silvi and my mother…. And both thought I wanted to present a lovely dress (not a funny mistake, which was my real intention) and they congratulated me on the nice fit with the low waist.

Yeah…. Rest in peace pieces dress ???
Now I am bit angry at myself, because I think my mother and Silvi were right. I hope I can attach the skirt a second time in the same manner as the first. But I am not so hopeful as I achieved this lovely fit accidentally.
Cross your fingers and send me sewing-luck. If not, you may hear of a big fire in Germany ???

And little criticism at the end:
Dear La Maison Victor, I was so happy to have found your book with such an incredible inclusive size range only to notice that not all patterns are graded up to the bigger sizes, for example the Eden dress… Why? I am sure my bigger sized friends would also love to sew all dresses in this book and not only 7 of them. Will you remedy this soon? If not, I find the title of the book (15 dresses in size 30-56) misleading.

Thank you @crosheille for iniciating and @muscara, @shanibeer, @marblely for hosting the #needleworkmonday. If you want to see more beautiful projects with yarn, fabric and most of all needles, follow @needleworkmonday on steemit. Or even better grab your needles and keyboard and join the #needleworkmonday community. You can read more comments on this post on my steemit blog.