muslin making and palette play

Same pattern company, different type of garment... I'm making a Robson Coat next!

I've learned from experience that Sewaholic Patterns need more tweaking on my top half than my bottom half. (Incidentally, I really hope I still have that wedding dress muslin around somewhere, because I'd like to make a "real" Cambie sometime and don't want to muslin the top 3 times again!) So I figured I'd better actually suck it up and make a muslin on this one. Since it looked like the finished garment measurements for the bust and waist were about the same, and my bust isn't quite that...um...flat, I decided to experiment with cutting a size 10 for the top and sleeves, grading to an 8 at the waist, and leaving it a size 8 for the hips.

Here's my result.

The front of the coat. I didn't cut the muslin the full length, because fitting over the hips was not the issue I was worried about. I'm also not entirely sure I pinned the coat closed in the places marked on the pattern, or on the correct side for that matter, but you get the idea. I do think my grading worked pretty well, though there is a bit of a diagonal wrinkle going towards that first pin that makes me wonder if I need to do a slight FBA after all. I also doubt I'm going to be doing airplane impressions much in this, but I wanted to test the range of movement in the arms. They feel pretty comfortable over a long-sleeved shirt, which is probably the most I'd be wearing under this, so even though it pulls when I do that, I think I'll be good.



And then here's the back. I know I've got a bit of a swayback going here, though I don't want to overfit this one since it's meant to be worn over other things. I might just leave it. The one tweak I'm thinking I may want to seriously consider is adding just a little more room across the upper back--this was me raising my arms to the level I would need to, say, drive my car. It's not like I'm about to do my impression of the Hulk, but adding just a tiny bit more room, say 1/8" in the center back on each side, might do a lot for avoiding strain on the seam. Any thoughts from you fitting gurus out there?

It looks like the sleeve length is pretty good here, but I think I'll have to check the hem depth and probably add a little to the final pattern--I'm probably not going to want it much shorter than what it's showing up as here.

I think I'm going to like the style of this coat! And though I am going for the full length for the real version, because I like longer coats, this muslin makes me think that it could be a cute shorter coat as well. 


I'm throwing the most recent Wardrobe Architect assignment in this post too, because it's more or less an extension of last week's color assignment. All we were asked to do was organize our palettes into three categories: neutrals, near-neutrals, and statement colors.

So I took last week's palette and did a little rearranging. No surprise, over half of my colors fall into the "statement" category. Unless teal is now a neutral, because I wear it a lot these days. It's the perfect compromise color between blue and green. So teal is totally a neutral, right?

Even though I wasn't sure how to make metallic swatches on Photoshop, I'm adding metallic silver, gold and copper to my near neutrals, because the majority of my jewelry incorporates some kind of metallic. I do mostly lean towards silvers, but have discovered the value of having gold, especially the more antique color, and copper to mix things up over the last few years.

Of course, the problem with statement colors being your main thing is that there's so many different shades of the same thing. Like that purple-- I categorized it as plum, but it could also be eggplant, or maybe a darker radiant orchid, since that's the color of the year. The darker green could be emerald, or kelly, or grass, or whatever. There's probably at least 5 shades that could fall under the umbrella of "teal". So I'm looking at this more as a guideline than a rule.