anatomy of a wadder

All week my sewing has been paralysed by my recent wadder that has been hanging over my head.  You see I really really wanted it to work, but at the moment I'm too tired and too lazy to fix it, especially since it is a maternity dress for work and I only have two weeks left at the office (6 days, but who is counting!?).  So unfortunately it will go into the UFO box waiting to either be refashioned or possibly fixed if I ever do something crazy like get pregnant again.

But in the interests of keeping it real around here, and to serve as a reminder to myself to avoid making such a fundamental mistake again in the future I thought I'd share it.  Trust me it's pretty funny 'cos it was such a stoopid mistake, but as with most things in life mistakes come about when you're rushing or just not thinking things through properly.  This was a case of both (but mostly the latter).

When I spied dress #116 in the October 2011 issue of Burda magazine I really liked it, but was unsure if it was because I had been watching too much Downton Abbey and that in reality this dress was a little too French maid costumey for real life.  Especially when you're preggers you've got to be careful not to veer into the cutesy territory.

But then I spied this dress in the window at Jigsaw for $269:

I figured there must be a trend happening for contrasting collars.  So I decided to take this rather plain black wool crepe dress made from Vogue 2818 last time I was pregnant and upfashion it since I hadn't worn it all this pregnancy.








The plan was to sew on a peter pan collar and hem band from some white wool crepe from the stash, and to cut the sleeves to a cap sleeve because we are (sort of) in summer here right now.  So I unpicked the decorative ribbon I had sewn around the neckline, the topstitching, understitching and neck seam all done in black thread on black wool crepe (my poor eyes!), and had to undo most of the empire seam as well so I could turn the bodice inside out.

Well that was a lot of boring and tedious work, which is what led me to a severe case of laziness, thoughtlessness and rushing to just finish the damn thing resulting in a major stuff up.  You see I just traced the collar from the Burda magazine, cut it out and sewed it on without thinking whether it would fit.  Too bad the Burda pattern is for a round high neck dress, and my Vogue dress is a wide necked bateau style neckline - it was never ever going to work as the curves didn't match!  But it didn't twig at this stage....

When I sewed it on, I realised the collar was too short to meet at the centre back zip but thought I could live with it extending just past the shoulder seams since it's meant to be a feature at the front anyway.  So I clipped the collar, edgestitched the neckline, sewed the bodice and lining back together at the empire waist seam (even overlocking the seam!) and tried it on.  It stuck up in the air just like this:

And that my friends is how you make a simple silly mistake befitting someone who has been sewing for 15 seconds not 15 years!

Now that I've got that off my chest hopefully I can find the motivation to get back into my sewing room - only 6 weeks before the next baby is due so I shouldn't waste this time at all!