Serving you high femme lumberjack, today I have for you the Beryl dress from Fibre Mood's Fall 2023 issue in a slubby, small-scale, red-and-black plaid. Surprising no one, I picked a pattern that is essentially another collared button-up shirt, but with some fun pleating and a unique blouson top silhouette.
There's a neat juxtaposition between its elegant pencil skirt and oversized, almost slouchy shirt bodice and dolman sleeves. Altogether the dress is both appropriately chic as well as casual enough to be streetwear. My evidence for the latter being that everybody and their mother (and myself) seem compelled towards styling the dress with a beanie and combat boots or sneakers — a compulsion only strengthened by choosing a plaid check fabric that evokes the image of that one trusty, 10-year-old flannel overshirt everybody has in their wardrobe. It's just like that shirt but pretty'd up.
I'll mention this first to get it out of the way: this is not a great dress if you need to lift your arms which is typical of dolman sleeves with no gusset to aid with mobility. You can manage if you push the sleeves up to your elbow but that gets cumbersome quickly. Keep this in mind if you're considering sewing Beryl, but if you otherwise don't mind, then go wild. Anyway!
I cut size 6 through the bust and waist and graded to a size 4 at the hips. And... it's too big in the waist. Darn. The bodice size can be fudged because there's so much positive ease, but the skirt has to be fitted to keep from falling and dragging the bodice downwards, which happens to be exactly what my skirt is doing currently. I wish the pattern had more body measurements listed to correspond with the finished garment measurements so I'd know how much positive ease the designers intended the skirt to have. It only lists the body measurements for the bust which is unhelpful because, again, the pattern's description emphasizes that the dress should be fitted at the waist and hips and loose elsewhere. It says to refer to your bust and then check if the finished waist measurement will give you enough room; well, how much room is enough? And how much is too much? While I can determine that for myself, leaving those measurements out is an oversight and it doesn't make sense given how the dress is supposed to hang on a body.
Tangentially, my dress's waist is greater the finished waist measurement listed in the pattern, but I believe it's because the crinkly seersucker I used stretched out as I was sewing it. The paper pattern pieces measure accurately to the finished dimensions, so I'm not claiming Fibre Mood made a mistake there. It's unfortunate, is all. Well, I'm choosing to belt it to get the desired effect instead of taking in the side seams. If I were to do so, I would cut into the furthest pleat and lose more volume in the bodice than I'd like.
I found the instructions perfectly passable and easy to understand. If I were to nitpick, I would say that there are elements that, while not absolutely critical when omitted, would have been nice to have. For example, when sewing the pleats along the sleeve, you are instructed to match two notches which then create a fold line, and then you sew parallel to that line.
I'm apprehensive about the fabric I used. This coarsely woven cotton seersucker seemed like it would be the necessary amount of tough, meaning not exactly tough, just not fragile and it's already proven it can't be roughed up at all. The individual yarns in the weave have broken from unpicking a seam, or snagging on a loose hangnail, or general small amounts friction. I understand it's Me-Made May and we're supposed to highlight slow fashion and the projects that are meant to last us through the years, that wear and tear is a normal and expected occurrence, but we can mitigate decay by caring for and cherishing our things. Sadly my dress already seemed to be at risk of disintegrating to dust before it was even finished, and it just might in the near future. Fingers crossed that it won't, but I just have to laughcry at how poorly this bodes.
Summary/Notes:
- Size 6 bodice, size 6 waist, graded to size 4 hips
- Shortened hem by 7 inches
I quite like the finished result, though having sewn a similarly constructed Burda dress, I wonder whether waist sagging is inevitable unless one uses fabric with zero give and adds a lining to boot. It's like an inverse fit-and-flare, and the loose top+fitted bottom seem to not work without a belt, maybe? Also, these sorts of guessing games about pattern measurements and fit are why I finally gave up and started drafting my own. If I'm going to have to measure and do all the thinking about ease, I might as well draw the thing from scratch!
ReplyDeleteI've seen several Beryls sewn by others that fit the way they're supposed to, not like mine. But then again there's a chance that they've stretched out over time and aren't shown on social media after the fact. Who can say?
DeleteI'm still too lazy to self-draft most of the time (although there once was a time when I was motivated and ambitious) and luckily Fibre Mood is the only pattern publisher that's given me problems with vague or sparse information.