Vogue 8151: The Gathered “Dart” Version
I made this darted tee a little while ago in an attempt to get a better fit for my full bust. Shams commented that she generally skipped the darts, and just eases them in. I decided to try that when I recently needed a slew of tees. First, here’s the pattern:
And here’s the finished tee, front view, made with the “darts” eased into the side seams:
And back view:
Looks more or less OK, right? Not so fast, folks. Something’s a bit wonky here.
For the first tee, I eased the dart’s fullness right where the dart was placed on the shirt. Big mistake! Somehow, this left me with a lot of extra fabric just below my bust. It was a weird fit failure; kind of as if I’d located the dart point three inches below the “point” of my bust. Amusing, but not amusing enough for an immortalizing picture.
So I re-fit the thing, and placed the ease directly across the rather broad expanse of my full bust. This meant that I began easing the extra fullness right at the armpit. Strange, but it worked. Sort of:
The ease covers a pretty broad territory, and the alteration is pretty obvious, isn’t it? But I really couldn’t have bunched this up any more –not only does this represent the true height of my bust’s fullness, but if I’d crammed this “ease” into any smaller territory, we’d be calling it “gathers”. It’s perilously close to gathering as it is.
See how the side seam pulls to the front a little across from the bust? You can’t see it in the picture, but it straightens out so that, at the hem, it’s exactly where it should be. Also weird; I guess that’s the proof that I really do need this extra space in the bust and not elsewhere. But somehow this just doesn’t seem quite right.
Because I needed a bunch of shirts in a hurry, I whipped up four of these:
Good colors, no? But these shirts are flawed, deeply flawed. They’re quite comfortable to wear, but that ease is just . . . strange.
This is a much nicer shirt to wear than the darted tee. Tee shirts just don’t want to be constrained the way darts long to be; the knit fabric wants to shift around a bit too much, conforming, as knits do, to the moving body. The easing on these versions really does make the shirt feel more like a tee, and there is enough room here for my bust, but the alteration is just wrong.
Any advice, fellow sewists? I do have a brand new copy of the Palmer DVD for the “Full Busted”. I probably should have waited to make these until after it arrived (ya think?!?). I’ll be checking out the DVD before I try the next knit top; it can’t hurt!
Reminder: My duct tape dummy is larger than I am now, for what that’s worth. It’s really obvious if you compare the fit my the darted tee (on me) and the fit of this one (on the dummy), but is, I think, irrelevant to these alteration issues. It’s just easier to get fast photos using the dummy, even if the bod is not exactly mine any more.