Colette Pastille

Look at that smug little smile…

My brother got me the Colette book for Christmas, and it’s awesome. All the little things I hadn’t quite understood before – particularly fitting issues – are way clearer now. For my first item from the book, I decided to make the Pastille dress as an exercise in fitting.

My original plan was to use this as a kind of wearable toile, purely for fitting practice, as I wasn’t sure the shape would suit me.

This is the first time I’ve made a toile “properly” – except I actually really like it so it no longer counts as a toile… I traced out the pieces (as oppose to cutting, which I normally do with my PDFs).

I cut the pattern as a size 6 on the bust, 8 on the waist and 4 on the hips. I have ridiculously tiny 35″ hips – they’re actually way smaller than a size 4 and often come up as a size 0 or smaller on patterns. Basically, I am shaped like a carrot, but I don’t want to look like a carrot so I always size up.

I don’t know if you can see, but this is the original pattern piece with edits marked on. There were a lot of changes.

I used the arm scyes and sleeves from the Emery dress, because I just don’t like cap sleeves. They’re too agnostic – sleeves are either there or they’re not. They can’t be somewhere in between.

I tacked all my pieces together in this quite fabulous African wax print. I made a vague attempt at pattern matching, but this fabric is too varied and I would need at least 6 metres of it to get it right, so I didn’t try too hard.

My first proper invisible zip… obviously I hand picked it so not 100% invisible, but pleased all the same.

When I tried it on, it was too big in all sorts of directions (see terrible mirror selfies below). The bodice was too long and the waist too wide, plus it had a hunchback, which I’ve seen on other blogs is a common problem with this pattern.

Before making any changes…

To fix it, I did the following – bear in mind I’m a beginner! This might not be the best way and it hasn’t come up perfect but it’s definitely better…

• took the waist in about 2cm on each side, tapering to nothing at the arm scyes
• brought the shoulders down 2cm (the darts were also too low)
• shortened the bodice by 2.5cm
• redrew the neckline and arm scyes
• redrew the upper back darts
• raised the centre back waist about 5cm on the bodice tapering to nothing at the side seams
• raised the centre back waist about 4cm on the skirt tapering to nothing at the side seams

Half way through fitting the back. And yes that is my hair on the right…

I wonder if I should be cutting a smaller size?

Finally, I decided that the pleats would be a bit pointless on this busy print. However, I plan on making another one in a plain fabric, and I think they’ll be good there.

Insides – I pinked it half to death

I’m pretty pleased with this dress – my first real attempt at fitting! Once I’d made the changes, it was actually really fast to sew up, especially putting my pinking shears to use 😀

Yay pinking shears 😀 (my hand is in a weird position because I was trying to take a photo…)

So overall I like this pattern. It’s a simple shape but I think it’s flattering, and I reckon it would work up just as well in a plain fabric as in a print. I’ll be making this again, if I ever get through my mile-long list of things I want to make…