The Something Suit - It Begins...

Obviously I'm having trouble coming up with a name for this suit... anyone got any ideas???

This suit is the first of many suits I hope to make this year.  And you know me, I don't want to start with something easy!

I decided to recreate this suit:

This suit is for sale on Etsy at FabGabs Vintage.  You can see the listing here, and it is being modeled by the divine Solanah who blogs here.

I was thinking I was going to have to buy a pattern and then modify it to have the features of the suit... and then I found this: 

I was gobsmacked!  I hit the Add To Cart and Purchase buttons so fast  it was a blur!  There is another one for sale here if anyone is interested!  Anyway, I didn't really care that it wasn't going to fit me straight off the pattern...

Last thing to hunt down was the fabric.  I can't seem to find a decent place to buy wool suiting in Australia, so I went to my go-to website for wool fabrics (and other amazing things) - Gorgeous Fabrics.  It seems that grey pinstriped wool isn't very popular at the moment, and I had a choice of one.  Its a blend of wool, rayon and a bit of lycra, so its got stretch.  While I would have LIKED something a bit thicker with no stretch, I bought it anyway, and I'm glad I did.  Its got a lovely hand and drape so its perfect for this pattern.

The really fun bit was picking the accent fabric, and the lining fabric!

The top fabric is the lining fabric, a delicious raspberry pink satin.  The middle fabric is a scrumptious slightly darker raspberry pink velveteen which I will use for the bows and the buttons.  The bottom fabric is my charcoal grey suiting.

YUMMY!!!

The first job with the pattern was to do a muslin to see how bad the fit was.  This is how bad.

The back is ok-ish!

err... the front is not...

So I did some measurements and cut out another one...while I was at it I added 1.5" to the side of the back bodice:

Much better!

I was happy with the fit of this one, so I attacked it with a texta to mark out the princess line piece with the stripes going the other way.  Then I cut the pieces to make new pattern pieces.

Then to test the theory, I cut the pieces out of more scrap pieces of fabric and sewed them back together.

(Is this sounding like a bit of a process?  Cause it was...)

Hooray!!!  But have you noticed the oopsie that I did on the first muslin?  There was a fold line on the perforated pattern that had me fold a couple of inches over all the way up the inside edge... this is wrong.  But sadly I'd already stitched this muslin together by the time I'd worked it out.  So I unpicked it - again - and cut a bit off and stitched it together.  And thats when it looked like the photo above.

This shows the changes I made to my pattern pieces

The purple bits are the bits I cut off the second muslin to make it fit properly.

And then I realised I should really do a muslin of the sleeve too, since I'd made the adjustments to that part of the pattern as well.  I added some width to the sleeve and redrew the cap and inserted it into the muslin

Hooray!  It fit!!  I did have to taper the sleeve a bit, and cut it shorter to make it more bracelet length like the inspiration suit, than full length like the original.  BUT IT WAS DONE!

I unpicked it all and ironed it all flat and turned it into a paper pattern so I could use it again in the future.

It was enough work for one day I can tell you!

So about the name for this suit... can anyone come up with something???  I keep thinking raspberry something, but all inspiration has left me at this point!!! hahaha

Beccie
xxx