Donna Karan 1159 and rant

Another Vogue pattern dress by Donna Karan. I used a very drapey viscose knit print from my stash.

I read in PatternReview.com that some notches do not match. So, I went carefully examining instructions and drawings both. Also, many complained that the armholes are too deep. So I revised armhole lines as shown below in red, and applied stay tapes along the armholes.

My fix worked fine as shown on my dress form. However, I could have done better by making the following changes in both back and front armholes so that the bottom of the armholes do not sit towards front bodice.

Now, I must document what I observed on instruction sheet below. There are several instructions and drawings which are not correct.
Step 18: Another blogger mentioned it as well. To sew the lining and the dress piece together, one must place the right side of lining and wrong side of the back body section together. Otherwise, the wrong side of the lining will be against your legs.
In step 21, the drawing shows that the pleated front skirt section is sewn on to the right side of the lining. Well, it should be the wrong side.
There is an error on step 3, but you do not notice it until almost at the end, step 26. Step 3 have you fold over one of the edges along the shoulder line. Judging from the pattern sheet and the drawing, I folded the shoulder side.

In step 25, notches were not matching. No big deal, I thought. After all, step 23 confirmed what I did in step 3 was correct.

Then, in step 26 what do I see?

The folded edge on Step 3 should have been the neck side. This made sense to me. As you wear the dress, the front has a nice folded edge and it looks smoother when the neck edge is folded over at shoulder as well. Now this can be easily fixed by undoing Step 3 and fold the neck edges over. Well, not quite. When you do so, the pleats along the shoulder seam are now displaced: they are not centered as they should be. In order to correct it, one must start with the pattern piece and move all the marking for pleats about 1cm towards the center of the pattern piece, fold the pattern sheet along the new pleat lines and re-draw the upper edges accordingly.
Although I am quite happy with the dress and the misplaced pleats are not that bothersome, I’ll have to tackle this pattern again.

Harmonie Stripes

This cardigan is a modified version of Harmonie from Rowan’s The Milk Cotton Collection. Its fabric is knit with two-row stripes with slip stitches. Slipped stitches produces considerably thicker fabric. The row gauge here was 50 per 4 inches. My thought was that this fabric would not suitable for a pullover but great for a jacket or cardigan. I also had a large leftover stash of cotton and cotton blends in DK weight.

 


The only new yarns I had to get were in lilac pink for front and collar bands and stone for the finished version. In between, I tried with other color schemes which included dark green and plum. They did not look right among my other pale colors. So, they were out.

When I try a new stitch pattern, I usually start with a sleeve to test and it was knitted per pattern instruction. For bodice parts, I wanted to add more side shaping and length, which was accomplished by measuring my favorite tee shirt and calculating row and stitch counts. Once that is done, the back was knitted. With the back bodice on the dress form, I decided how deep I want the front neck line to go down. More calculation was followed. I made the front wider by the width of the front band.

I am quite pleased with the result.