The Wedding Guest Outfit, Part I: Fabric and jacket muslin

It's March, and I have PLANS for the month, mostly to do with the outfit I am wearing to attend a wedding in April. I have been trying to decide what to make for a while now, with only partial success.

I feel like I should point out that this is a wedding where literally nobody cares what I look like. I'm a member of the bride's extended family but she's a lot younger than me (9 years) and our families aren't close. I'm not in the bridal party, I'll only know a handful of people, and just. Nobody cares. If I'm honest, the only reason I am focussing so hard on this stupid outfit is because, you know, the world is on fire (metaphorically) and I need the distraction. Also the first two months of the year have been appalling, weather-wise, and just the thought that it might one day be spring wedding season was something to cling on to through all the rain and (thankfully not directly affecting me) flooding.

What I'm trying to say is: my life does not actually depend in any way on making a successful wedding guest outfit, but you'd be forgiven for not realizing this based on the amount of mental effort I've put in so far.

At any rate, I have three well-defined priorities for the outfit:

1. It has to be suitable for the actual event: a spring wedding (late April) in the far north-east of England. There's always a chance that the weather might be nice, but it's statistically more likely it will be relatively cool and possibly wet. The wedding venue is indoors, however, so I don't need a full on coat. The wedding dress code is "dress to impress" which is.... not enormously helpful, but definitely made me pull out everything I own in the way of fancier fabrics -- lace, brocade, etc -- to consider. I naturally gravitate to darker colours, but I think a spring wedding calls for something at the lighter end of the range of colours I normally wear.

2. I'd like to be able to re-wear the components of the outfit at a later stage. I really don't go to a lot of weddings, or a lot of formal occasions in general, so ideally I don't want to make garments that I only wear once.

3. I want to be at least mostly comfortable, and to feel like I dressed appropriately. This is harder to pin down, but you know, when you look for images of spring wedding guest outfits you get basically pretty little floaty chiffon outfits as worn by 25 year olds and, at the other end of the spectrum, mother-of-the-bride outfits, and I am in neither camp!

In the end, after running through Plans A to Z and then back again, I have settled on a combination of two turquoise fabrics for my outfit:

Wedding guest outfit fabrics

The details of these fabrics do not photograph at all well in winter light!

The fabric on the left is a glazed linen. You can sort of see that it has an almost silvery sheen on top of the turquoise when the light catches it from the glazed effect. The fabric on the right is a brocade embroidered to look like darker turquoise and silver/pewter sequins. I actually bought these fabrics something like 3.5 years apart and with no intention of putting them together in an outfit, but they look great put together. I have 2m of the brocade and just over 3m of the glazed linen. However, I stored the linen badly and as a result I have a narrow section of sun damage running in a horizontal line about 1m into the fabric -- so I have 1m on one side of the line and 2m+ a bit on the other.

I waffled even more over patterns than fabrics, and I am not done with that part of this drama AT ALL. However, I have made one definite choice, which is to pair the sequin fabric with McCall's 7513.

The pattern I plan to use

 More specifically, I decided to use the cover model, view A, the shorter length with the pleated back peplum.

Muslin v 3 with shoulder princess seams on me and on Flossie

I have not used too many McCall's patterns, so I knew I definitely needed a muslin. In fact I needed three muslins to get to a fit level I like, and I made a whole laundry list of adjustments. The first muslin was a disaster (started from too large a size, then wondered why it fit at the bust and waist but the shoulder points were literally 6cm past my shoulder. Duh.). Version 2 was improvement (started 3 sizes smaller at the shoulder plus an additional narrow shoulder adjustment, with width adjustments for my bust and waist). The third muslin has a single but very significant change compared to muslin 2: I just don't like the combination of waist darts and my large, low bust, so I tried converting the darts to shoulder princess seams to match the way the back is constructed. I am really pleased with the final muslin, although I have one fit problem outstanding that I want to try to fix before I cut out the final version: my sleeves tend to twist towards the front.

My to do list for this week therefore looks like this: try to fix the sleeve issue; cut/trace/adjust the pieces of the pattern I didn't address in the muslin (lining, collar, facings); then cut out and interface where necessary. My goal is to set myself up to spend next weekend actually doing jacket construction. (Which I will doubtless document on Instagram, if you're interested!)

The elephant in the room is that I still don't know what to wear WITH the jacket. I thought I had setttled on a plan of a plain-ish darker teal silk blouse and a circle skirt with the glazed linen, but I keep being drawn to other options, including possibly making a dress, even though I am least likely to wear a dress again in the future. I think I will end up experimenting with some muslin options to see what I like best once the jacket is done.

Actually, this last point relates to the best news I have, which is that my long dormant -- or at least frequently napping -- sew-jo has roared back in full force, and now I want to Make All The Things and experiment with all kinds of stuff. I'm really looking forward to refreshing my wardrobe for spring and summer this year once the Wedding Guest Outfit is done.

Some of that will have to wait a bit though as my last update for today is that I managed to break my overlocker making a gift for my mum. :(

A "twin set" of cardigan and t-shirt, both using Ottobre patterns (tee & cardigan on left; t-shirt only on right)

My parents are off on a trip and as they will be away during UK Mother's Day (22 March -- don't panic, North Americans, we celebrate Mother's Day on a different day than you!) I decided to make my mum a gift before she left that she could take with her. I therefore made this t-shirt and cardigan set using a black polyester knit that has a floral design picked out in small silver plastic spots on the surface. The fabric is totally uncrushable and doesn't wrinkle, so it's perfect to stuff in a suitcase, and the pieces are really simple but the colour/fabric make them perfect to wear to dinner. I used two easy patterns from Ottobre, specifically 02-2012-09, a short-sleeved waterfall cardigan -- I made elbow length plain sleeves rather than the split sleeves in the pattern; and 02-2019-13, a simple square neckline tee -- I opened up the neckline a little by turning the binding to the inside, so it would fit in a way that showed off a necklace.

I'm going to be honest: they look really pretty in the photos, and in theory I like them a lot. In practice, that surface detail of little dots crunched a needle in my overlocker in the first 10 minutes of sewing and the broken needle killed my machine (temporarily I hope, I am waiting for a part) and it all went downhill from there. I made mistake after mistake, struggled with the fabric, managed to leave a (small, hard to see) scorch mark on the fabric and the silver smeared off one of the dots along one of the side seams of the t-shirt. I had to do two thirds of the construction on my regular machine so the inside of this garment looks utterly amateur, and I was overall embarrassed to give them to my mum as a gift! :( I am banking on maternal affection and the fact that it actually does look good from a few meters away to make it a worthwhile gift. /o\