Vogue Couturier 167 Part IV

Yesterday and today I worked on the skirt front and getting the skirt ready to attach to the bodice.

The skirt front has two darts and two released pleats. The darts are easy, but the released pleats do have to be placed properly as they are formed right at the point where the skirt front takes a right angle up towards the collar. I used square of organza to reinforce the corners, then clipped in and made the pleats. Here is one side with the dart and pleat:

The right side seam is complete, and the left one is still open as you can see in the picture of the three components below. I’m going to put an invisible zipper in the side, so I left it open for the moment. I’ll pick up one on Friday, as I only have a white one here at the moment.

I’ve looked over the instructions and there are five separate seams that connect the bodice to the skirt. Should be fun, and along with all the binding (and other sewing projects) I’m doing, it’ll take a few days. After that, it’s the zipper, hems, belt and buttons, and I’m done. I think.

Here are a few things I’ve meant to write about, but didn’t because some of the posts got long. Have I shown you the instruction sheet? There is only one instruction sheet. The sewing instructions are on one side, cutting diagrams on the other. It is divided into bodice, skirt and finishing. For the bodice there are 31 steps alone, not including binding or how you decided to finish the seams.

Another interesting thing is that on the pattern pieces themselves every notch is numbered. In the example below, you can see notch number 17 on the bodice shown on the right. This corresponds to notch number 17 on the waist edge of the skirt shown at the left. I’m not sure if you would actually write the notch number on your fabric pieces or just sort of keep track of them and refer to the pattern pieces if you got confused. The numbers also seem to appear in the order of construction, meaning that notch 1 is the first pair to match up, etc. all the way through notches 19. I couldn’t find notches 6 or 9, but found all the others.

That’s it for this installment, thanks for reading and being on this little journey with me!