McCall 5466, Pleat Neck Dress: Buyer Beware

This is another project, like the Vogue 7898 mock wrap asymmetric hem dress, that I made back in October for my Germany trip. I am really liking the whole pleated neck detail thing that is so popular in the pattern books right now. I can't say I've actually seen it on the street or in store windows, but it's cute enough that I think it will catch on eventually.

This project was extremely frustrating. It is certainly an argument for muslining because I put a lot of work into a project that ended up being almost too uncomfortable to wear because of the draft of the armscye and sleeves.

The first challenge was lining. This being a Big 3 pattern, as is typical it did not provide for lining. Since I was making this in a wool (from The Carol Collection, of course!) it really needed to be lined for comfort, not to mention it just makes things nicer all around.

I first tried morphing the facing and the bodice pattern pieces into a non-pleat bodice to stabilize the neckline. However, when I put the unpleated bodice lining together it was way too tight and it was clear I wouldn't be able to skip the pleated parts of the neckline in the lining. So that was a couple hours down the tube. I ended up just cutting the bodice pattern out of lining fabric. Unfortunately, even with understitching the lining peeks out a little bit at the neckline.



After this it was the cutting layout. You can see here that I altered the pattern by narrowing the front dart for a small bust adjustment and shortening the skirt about an inch on the lengthen/shorten line. I am short, but most of my shortness is in my legs and I generally don't need to shorten above the waist. To match the plaids, I cut the fronts and backs along the same axes, and lined up notches across from one another. Because the skirt has pleats and therefore the top and bottom plaids couldn't match entirely, I decided to match up the vertical plaids at the centers front and back instead of sides front and back.

The next step was the pockets. This has hip pockets on the skirt; I liked the look but worried about the danger of them billowing out and widening my hips. I used cording slightly shorter than the length of the pocket and used the feed dogs the ease the pockets into it. This worked very well and the pockets are firm and secure.

Now was the actual sewing. Believe it or not I actually hand basted the side seams to get the plaids to match up, which they do, beautifully.

The back skirt pleats turned out to be awful over my large booty; you can see here that they pretty much stuck straight out. I closed up the bottoms of the pleats to make them into darts, and they lay well on the final product.

This dress took me a several weekends worth of sewing to finish because of all the effort I put into it. I was concerned about the fit of the armscye during construction, but foolishly assumed this problem would somehow take care of itself when the dress was all put together. Foolish, foolish assumption. I have an exquisitely constructed dress in which I can barely move (this is after going back in and sewing everything on the very edge of the seam allowances to give me more room). The photo at right illustrates the limited range of motions of my arms, and every time I try to lift something I feel like the seams are going to split. It is a huge disappointment after all that work. I can only wear it on days I know I won't be doing anything strenuous (which, let's face it, is most days, but it's hard to get in and out of so my two-a-days at the gym are a disincentive to wearing it to work).

Armscyes are so much trouble. Some, like this, are way too tight. I have a small frame and though I work out and am toned I don't think my shoulders and arms are abnormally large--or even necessarily as large as the average size. And then there are ones like the Tippi Hedren dress that are way too large. I really don't get it.

I'm not going to give up on this style, as there are a lot of other options. I bought Simplicity 2846 as a replacement for this pattern; it has raglan sleeves so I figure it will give a little more ease of movement. Though I bought Simplicity 2724 for the shirtdress view (I have been shopping stash for a while to figure out what to make it out of) it also has a pleat neck bodice view. And BWOF gave us one in a knit in 12-2008-113.

All photos of this project are here and the pattern review is here.