Not-necessarily-black-not-necessarily-a-dress Cocktail Outfit - Part One

I got all excited for our planned Cocktail Party at PR Weekend Montreal, because in real life I never go to dress-up cocktail parties - and then the Vogue patterns for summer were announced and I chose Vogue 1182, the Kay Unger dress with draped cross-over front and lovely wide collar.

The red version of this dress is obviously sewn in silk dupioni and I decided to baldly imitate Vogue.

I chose one of those fantastic iridescent dupionis where the warp and weft are different colours - in my case fuchsia warp is combined with a brilliant orange weft.  This photo just does not do justice to the richness of the fabric in person but it'll have to do.

But first to muslin the pattern.

Normally, I'm all for cutting Big 4 patterns, but in this case two of the pattern pieces (the side front and side back) were not nested in the usual way.  This made switching between sizes (which I have to do with 2 sizes difference between bust/waist and hip) impossible, so I started by tracing these pieces.  Grrr.

Vogue says this pattern is "average" difficulty.  The reason is that it has 4 different centre front pieces - the full length right front (overlap) with pleats, the half-length left front (underlap) with a dart running from the princess seam to bust point, the half-length upper CF lining with a dart running from the neckline down to the bust point, and the half-length lower CF lining.  To test the pattern, I used the lower CF lining piece plus the upper left front.

I cut a 10 from the waist up, transitioning to a 14 at the hip.  I found that the neckline was gappy, as shown to the right.  That would have been very bad!  On the plus side, the lower front fit reasonably well. 

In the back, it was quite sloppy above the waist with fabric pooling in the small of my back.  At the sides, I needed to fine-tune the hip curve. 

I pinned out approximately 2cm horizontally at the neck edge and collar, transitioning to nothing near the side seams.  This required alterations to both upper and under collar pieces, all 3 upper CF pieces and the side front.  The mechanics of this were similar to what I had to do on the little top and jacket I recently made. 

To the right is a picture of the front with my pinned changes.

To the left you can see the changes pinned in the back. 

Next up ... to unveil the dress.