De-frumping

Well, this is not what I expected to be writing about this week. In fact, until Friday afternoon this wasn't even what I expected to be sewing this week.

Yes, one of those

For the last nine years Simplicity 1587, aka The Dress of Frump, has been the nadir of my dressmaking, the benchmark of disaster. Whenever something didn't turn out as planned, from faint disappointment to major calamity, I always asked myself, "Is this as bad as The Dress of Frump?". And the answer was always, but always, "No".

On Friday I was having a tidy up/clear out when I found The Dress of Frump scrunched up in a ball under a pile of other stuff. This was a surprise, as I thought I had thrown it out years ago. I guess it was reprieved because I really liked the fabric, so couldn't bear to get rid of it. Out of curiosity, I tried it on. And it didn't look as bad as I was expecting. Although to be fair, over nine years it has come to be so hideously unappealing in my memory that anything which didn't actually cause the mirror to crack was going to look better than expected.

I still really like the fabric, and started to wonder if there was any way I could fix the dress. The material had been distinctly off grain and, instead of just living with it (hardly an issue with a floral print), I had tried, and failed, to correct it - and ended up with a very wonky garment. On top of that, the design of the skirt did me no favours. A skirt yoke may suit some people, but I am not one of them, and the gathering of the lower skirt just looked skimpy and messy.

There is nothing appealing about this look

Also, some of the gathers stuck out weirdly.

All of the centre section sticks out

On the bodice, the yoke was probably too long, but the main thing was that the pleats were all over the place.

Messy

This was hardly surprising, as the neckline turned out to be longer on one side than the other, and the pleating wasn't remotely symmetrical.

Three small on one side, two large on the other - why?

Somehow, I had even sewn in the centre tab off kilter.

The tab seam and the yoke seam do not line up

I have no idea what I thought I was doing here

There are other, smaller, issues, but I came to the conclusion that what made the dress look so bad overall was that the biggest faults are right in the centre front. So, on the basis that the worst I could do was ruin an already bad dress I didn't even know I had, I set to work.

I started with the skirt, unpicking the section of the seam which joined the yoke to the gathered lower section. Then I pressed out the gathering, and started reattaching the skirt out from the centre, but flat. Once I had attached the centre third of the skirt, I folded the excess fabric into inverted box pleats. I would have preferred a single deeper pleat in the centre, but the curved shape of the yoke made this impossible - I had to place the pleats where the yoke edge was more horizontal. It took some fiddling to get them to hang straight, but I feel it's a neater effect than the gathers.

A smooth skirt front, and the pleats line up with the bodice gathers

Encouraged by this success, I tackled the neckline. This was a lot trickier, and with hindsight I wonder if I should just have fixed the wonky tab and left well alone with the pleats. Once unpicked, they really did not want to be pleated back up in a slightly different way. But eventually, I got everything back in place. Finally, I added some shoulder pads to raise the yoke-bodice seam a little and add support to the sleeve heads.

Not great, but better

The end result is still not brilliant, and things like the uneven hem were impossible to fix without ending up with a shorter dress than I wanted. But it's a lot better than it was, and worth the effort to get it more or less wearable.

Definitely improved overall

My next 'little' job is fixing some damaged cushions from my local community café, and then I can get back to what I was meant to be doing this week - making a dress out of the 1986 toile.