Colour Blocked Elodie Dress

I’m not sure how it happened that this is my first blog post of 2022, but I’m going to blame it on work being really busy, and me taking on too many big projects at once, getting overwhelmed, and then not wanting to do any of it. But I’ve been trying to eliminate works-in-progress to help with the overwhelm, and have also recently gone through my fabric and pattern stashes which has made me feel very rejuvenated! I’m happy to be able to show you this Elodie dress, even though it was a intended-to-be-wearable muslin that turned out to not be the right size for me.

You may be wondering, why would someone choose to do a colour blocked version as a muslin of a pattern. Well, it’s because I had these two fabrics in my stash already and they were intended to be a different colour blocked dress. More specifically, I bought them to make this awesome dress that Nancy Wheeler wears on season 3 of Stranger Things for a Halloween costume a few years ago. But then I put my sewing machine in for a tune up a month before Halloween and then somehow it took them until October 29th to finish the tune up, so I had no time to actually sew the dress. And then the next year it was no longer topical and I never made it. But I love these colours together and was interested in the idea of making a dress that still combined the fabrics. I had just enough of each of them to squeeze this Elodie out with basically no scraps, which is an ideal stash busting project. I wish I could remember how much of each I bought so I could be really thorough, but I honestly have zero clue. They’re just solid quilting cottons, and I wasn’t paying much attention because I was going to be winging it on the Halloween dress construction/hacking in the first place.

I hadn’t really been that interested in the Elodie pattern until my partner pointed out recently that it’s basically like a dress version of the Zadie jumpsuit, which I have multiple versions of and wear all the time. And he’s not wrong. I’m disappointed that this version doesn’t fit great, because I love the colours, but I’m definitely going to make another version in a size up. This is a straight size 10, which used to be my Closet Core size, but since my back and shoulders getting bigger due to climbing, I’m really a size 12 now. I should have recognized that based on the measurements, but I think I just was so stuck in my head on the fact that I’ve always made size 10 from this company and ignored the facts. Has anyone else done this? I feel like it’s a similar thing to wanting to buy the same size from a store at the mall, except at the mall you just try the thing on and immediately realize it doesn’t fit instead of constructing an entire dress and THEN realizing that you knew your body was not the same size but didn’t actually incorporate that knowledge into the stage where you picked what size to make. Anyway. I really like this pattern, and I’m definitely going to do another version that will fit better – I have this great golden-y linen from Blackbird Fabrics (not the exact one linked, but the colour is pretty close) and I think it’s going to be great. If you’re looking at the photos and wondering what I mean about it not fitting, I’m going to show you below.

You can see it a little bit in the full length photo a couple photos above this, but more below. There’s a lot of gaping in the neckline (and people have raved about the fact that the Elodie does NOT gape), and I can tell exactly what’s causing it from some other clues. The side seams are not coming to my actual sides, which tells me that the back is not wide enough for my body, and that obviously carries through into the proportion of the front. So even though I’ve tied it quite tightly and wrapped it snugly around myself, the fabric in the back is preventing it from overlapping the correct amount in front while still leaving enough room for my body to fit inside. This means that the waist cannot settle into its natural position and is tightly sitting right at the bottom of my ribs, making the fabric of the bodice bunch up between my shoulders and waist. That’s what’s making it gape, and that’s why I think it can be solved by simply going up a size instead of just making a bunch of modifications to the front. If I didn’t have the issue with the side seams not sitting at my actual side, I would maybe fussy with the front more, but that’s a glaring sign to me that the whole thing is just too small for the circumference of my body. It’s also a little tight in the armpits, and it’s not enough to really bother me if everything else was fitting correctly, but since it’s on top of the other things, going up a size will likely fix that as well!

One detail that I’m really pleased with is that I took the time to change thread colours when I changed which fabric I was sewing, including on the hem! Check out how accurate the changeover is. I’m feeling pretty pompous about that, and it’s nice to not feel grumpy about this project just because it doesn’t happen to fit. The fitting issues are pretty straightforward, and I already have the next size up traced off so I can sew another version soon!