Fair Fit Spring/Summer Dress Collection - Megan's Dress and How I Designed Dress 7

Dress 7 and Megan's Dress

 I can't wait to share Megan's dress with you today. In the development of the Fair Fit Method, and all of its courses, I am continuously testing the course with experienced makers in order to make sure my instructions are clear, the pattern is refined, and add more explanation that is helpful as the course grows and develops.

Megan is an experienced fashion design PHD student at LSU, and I had the intention of working with her during her winter break for over 6 months. She was highly recommended by my friend Dr. Casey Stannard, and when Megan agreed to test the course and work with me during the winter to add some finishing touches on the course work I was thrilled. 

Megan's Dress

And working with Megan added a lot of great additional material to the coursework of Learn and Make the Fair Fit Dress. In the last few years of teaching and testing the Fair Fit Method, I've learned it's important for students to see the draping and fitting from multiple perspectives, so if I have a student who can work with me in person in Baton Rouge, it's a huge benefit if I can capture our thought process so that others can learn and see other people work the method from their point of view - not just mine. 

Megan created her dress from Ikea sheets, and I love the graphic black and white of this dress. I am always talking about how I used sheets on a lot of my previous garments and am really in love with how soft the final pieces are. This take "secret pajamas" to a whole new level, while repurposing material that makes for great test garments.

In Megan's case, she made her first dress in the sheets, and it ended up being a great final garment. So much so I wanted her to be in the video as our character's sewing friend, with the idea that they both made custom garments for themselves. Watch the video here to see the design process.

What I learned from working with Megan is to be really clear that you don't have to follow the pattern and my process to the letter. You can cut and customize the Fair Fit dress, especially when you see something you don't like and want to change. That's the whole point- you get to choose.

When Megan was about to drape her skirt, she reached out to me and asked if she could shorten the torso because she didn't feel the length was hitting her in a flattering place. I said absolutely, I want you to do that. Which this is a very common place for alteration due to proportions and that most people have varied places where their actual waist (natural waist) is located. I even made a custom pattern set that is included in the dress course as a bonus to make the alteration easier. 

I'm so happy with how Megan's dress came out, and it was great to work with her and see how she worked with the pattern and videos. The added bonus for me was that she had a very positive experience with her dress and that it was made just for her. Sometimes as designers, we might not make as many things for ourselves. It has only been in recent years that I started making clothes for myself to wear, I was always busy making things for other people and purposes. Megan shared that same tendency, and I'm so happy that the Fair Fit project created an opportunity for her to sew and design for herself. I want other's to have the same experience!

Designing Dress 7

Dress 7 is a "coming attractions" dress that I developed and will add to the 2019 coursework. In 2019 Fair Fit Method courses, I'm adding more advanced level trainings to teach students how to use the pattern sets and blocks from earlier courses and use pattern drafting skillsto draft and drape customized variations. 

Dress 7 is an example. It's a combination of eliminating the under bust and torso seams, and combining them into one long princess seam style line. Then I use slash and spread from the fullness principle to add just enough design ease to create this easy and comfortable, streamlined style line.

I can't wait to teach Fair Fit Method students some of these pattern variations next year, and have started developing the timeline for the videos so that they will be available for more opportunities to learn and grow with some of these essential fashion design skills.

To see more of the variations, and preview of the patterns and process used to make the garments in this collection, I email the latest updates to my newsletter subscribers. If you would like to see more of these Spring Summer Fair Fit designs, you can go here to subscribe. I will also follow up with more posts, videos, and helpful articles for sewists interested in custom design and you will get the latest class announcements and promotions when enrollment opens again.

Of course, this dress was entirely repurposed too. I used a combo of 2 men's Fair Fit button downs, sewn and pieced with pants and even used the sleeves at the bottom to create some color block variations and add pops of green that give it some variety in the khaki. 

I hope you enjoyed this post and this series! To watch the full video, you can check it out below, and learn more about the other dresses in the collection, check out the related posts and learn how they were made.

 

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