Hazel Dress - or fun with Small Bust Adjustments

The second dress I tackled turned out to be much more complicated than I realized it would be. I had found some lovely purple eyelet in the remnants bin at Finch Knitting and Sewing Studio and knew it would make a lovely sundress, and so I decided to make the Hazel by Colette (now Seamwork). 

There were two things I knew that would have to be modified on the dress for both the fabric, and my body time.

First, I knew going into the make that I would need to do a small bust adjustment or SBA. I've realized that I will always need to do one as an A cup sewing in a C cup world - but there are worse problems to have. It just means more mockups.

Second, the eyelet has large holes. I would have to line the dress. I decided to just line it with muslin, and as I was using muslin to do my mockup, I'd just repurpose it as lining. Instead of doing a separate lining, I decided to sew the muslin to the eyelet and treat the two pieces of fabric as one.

When I made the Hazel, I'd only ever done a single bust adjustment, and there is no guide on how to do one for this particular pattern. It was... difficult to say the least. The issue is that it's a triangular bodice.

With darts.

I searched high and low for someone to have posted how they'd done a bust adjustment on this pattern. I eventually stumbled across a FBA from symon sez's blog, and reversed it to get a SBA out of it. 

I say this like it was easy. It was not. I don't know why it was so difficult for me. It took a few tries to get a mockup that worked, and I nearly gave up. I was so happy to finish it. 

This was also my first time sewing an invisible zipper. It was not as daunting a task as I thought it would be! Check another thing off my sewing skills list.

Overall, I like the way the dress looks, even if the bodice was not fun to sew due to the headache with the SBA. The pockets are also a nice touch.