Black Pencil Skirt

The vintage wardrobe sewing continues, with a bit of a twist.  I bought a Bonfit Patterner, well a long time ago.  I saw the ad in Vogue Patterns and thought I'd try it out.  I bought the complete kit: bodice, skirt and pants patterners, with all the 'extra' books on fashion design concepts and sample outfits to make.

I've had mixed luck with this system.  Skirts have worked out, but really, skirts aren't that complicated.  I've been less successful with blouses and pants.

I originally bought this system before Google or internet bloggery, so I would take it out once in a while, make something and either love it or hate it and then stick it on the shelf.  Over the past few years, I would search for Bonfit Patterners and see if anyone blogged about their garments turned out.  My recent search delivered a few results, which I'll include here.

I've found two comments on Pattern Review, both by Sandyjo from 2006, who made a skirt and pair of pants and loved it. 

Sewingplum had an informative post about her experience.  There were two good bits of advice has to do with cup size and the fact that the Bonfit Patterner is designed for a b cup.  Fortunately, that's my cup size.  The other is that she compared the fit of the Bonfit to the McCalls fitting pattern.

Dale at Home Works, in 2006, made a basic top with cut on sleeves and a fitted blouse.  She's taken pattern drafting courses and could work out her sleeve problems using her other class methods.  She made two attempts at a fitted blouse and liked neither.

I like Sewingplum's idea of using another pattern and because I've had hit and miss results with this Bonfit Patterner, I thought I'd use a Burda pattern as my basis.  I've made several garments from my subscription to the Burda magazine.  I like the overall fit of Burda garments.  My main complaint with the Burda patterns is the chaos of the pattern sheets, which are color coded but I find it hard to follow the patterns. 

I'll take a moment to digress and explain my vintage wardrobe plan.  I'm not fixed on a single point in time for my garments.  I like the 30s, 40s, 50s and even early 60s, primarily the British fashions from Danger Man, which were done by a London fashion house.  Thankfully, the wonderful ladies of the Fedora Lounge offer much advice and resources for putting together a vintage wardrobe.  In the 50s thread, one of the recommended staples is a pencil skirt.

This was a chance for a quick sewing project that used fabric I had in my stash (black cotton twill leftover from the Hollywood Patterns suit jacket project) and I could try out the Bonfit skirt patterner.

However, I find the accompanying books not very helpful so I didn't refer to them.  I used a Burda pencil skirt pattern for the sizing.  I didn't care for the styling of the skirt, which had two pieces for the back and three vents.  I wanted a simple pencil skirt, with the front cut on the fold and a kick pleat in the back. 

Drafting the pattern was easy enough.  I didn't bother to use the Bonfit numbers and simply fit the skirt to the Burda skirt.  Once the patterner was set, I traced around the patterner for the front, traced the darts, added a 5/8" seam allowance.  I did the same for the back but added a 2" wide and 8" long kick pleat at the hem of the back.

Cut out the muslin and sewed it up.  The first thing I remembered was that the darts are in an odd place.  They are very close to the center front.  But, for this test, I am trying to use the patterner as designed.  I've never taken a pattern drafting class, which is why I purchased the Bonfit in the first place: it's a sloper.

The muslin fit pretty well.  The waistband was a tad loose, but I am on the Weight Watchers and regular workout path, so there's going to be on-going fitting issues for several months to come.  But that's another post - altering existing clothing.

I cut out my fashion fabric and got to sewing.  Darts made and pressed. French seams for the sides.  In fact, I thought I made my French seams too wide. I sewed the 3/8" seam, trimmed it to 1/4", turned, pressed, and sewed another 3/8" seam.

I got the skirt made and tried it on. It's too loose.  There is an odd puckering at the front that wasn't on the muslin.  Before I ripped the silly thing apart, I'm going to launder the skirt and try it on again, with a slip.  I'll post a follow-up to the post-laundry fitting.

Happy crafting!

Update 8/24/10 - I finally got around to fine-tuning the fit of this skirt by adding two front darts, which removed a total of 3/4".  Since the skirt was finished, I treated as a ready-to-wear alteration.  Removed the waistband, drafted and sewed the darts, pressed, re-attached the waistband and voila!  Pefect fit.