#batuu bounding

Still desperately wanting to be her apprentice😭

The dress continues to be really difficult to photograph -- on my table it looks like a fairly undifferentiated pile of black fabric, and on me standing in indirect sunlight isn't much better. But now that I can lace the side panels down completely, the dress actually fits me, so I'm finally getting a lot more wear out of it again.

And, more importantly, now that it's done I can start working on a new project.

A week ago, with about 6 weeks to go until I plan to wear it to Star Wars Nite at Disneyland, I decided to remake the Batuu Vest I made in 2024. Like I mentioned in my post about the belt I made to go with my Batuu outfit, the one from last year is both ~2" too long, and somewhere between 2" and 4" too wide through the hips. It was not playing well with the belt. But I also wasn't at all sure about trying to modify it, because the separating zipper and all the top-stitching.

Once I had the jersey dress project off my table, I pulled out my shoebox of scraps from last year's vest -- which were originally scraps left over from a dress I made in 2016. It's a medium-weight 100% linen in a lovely dark navy blue, and I really do love everything about the original vest except the fit in the last few inches, so I want to try to reproduce it as closely as possible. I ironed the scraps and checked them against my pattern pieces, and decided that I had enough to do a second two-layer vest out of this same fabric.

Using last year's vest as a fitting guide, I figured out that I wanted to take 2" to 2.5" off the length, and narrow each of the panels below the waist. Just like last year, I started with the lining layer, and folded 2" up at the lower edge of each pattern piece as a starting point, which let me squeeze them into even smaller scraps of fabric.

Since I know this pattern pretty well at this point (and since I transferred all my changes to my paper pattern as I made them last year), the lining layer came together really quickly. Even the bust seam that had required slash-and-spread last year just needed a ton of pinning this year, for some reason. I had all eight pieces cut out and sewn together by the middle of last week, which then let me try it on with the rest of my Batuu kit and figure out how much I wanted to take in from each of the seams.

I ended up leaving the seam between the side front and front panels alone, since it's already cut straight along the grain for stability reasons, and focused on taking out the excess width from the other panels in whatever way ended up looking best. Even at 2" shorter, I still ended up taking out between 2cm and 3cm on each seam. With five seams to work with, that's somewhere between 10cm and 15cm smaller than my one last year -- so all of that excess flaring should be gone from this version of the vest.

I marked those new seams, sewed them in, clipped off the extra, and unpicked the extra thread so I could securely tie the thread ends, then transferred the new measurements to my original paper pattern, so I could cut out matching pieces for the exterior of the vest. With just a little bit of non-machine work here and there over this last weekend, that got me to this point as of this morning:

I also ordered a second separating zipper (2" shorter than the original) and a second pack of the cool hooks-and-bars that I used on the original vest -- and thankfully I got both from Amazon last year, so it was easy to find them again in my order history. If I'd gotten them from JoAnn's in 2024 I would have had to completely re-source them lol.

This morning I drafted a really basic pattern for the little internal patch pockets that I put on the first vest -- either I never actually patterned the originals, or the tiny rectangle of pattern paper fell out of the rolled up pattern sometime in the last year. I think it's the former, but either is possible. I got two pockets cut out and set aside for when I have my iron out next, and then got started on cutting out the exterior pieces of the vest. As of sitting down to write this post and have some food, I have 5 pieces cut out and 3 left to go.

TFW u go to Batuu and get recruited into the resistance