I've gone back in yet again and taken in more of the lower sleeve armhole front and back to reduce the excess that still wasn't working. I think it's ready to leave the house now, just as the Indian summer departs and the snowblower man returns the machine from servicing.)
The 'beast' was the Roman Holiday Burda skirt that I have tussled with since last year. I finally finished it, but it is heavy to the point of unwieldy. Maybe Karen Blixen would wear it on safari, but if a lion tried to get at her, it would have to first chew through ten tons of cotton.
This is the rare occasion when I finished a project merely as a point of pride, and now own a garment that I will probably never wear. I could wear it with boots if it were in a winter fabric, but it's a heavy cotton that overwhelms the bare legs of summer. I underlined it in a heavy cotton and it weighs a ton, so all in all, a wash-out that killed my sewing mojo.
Which is a shame, since my son brought back some lovely baby blue crepe de chine from Hong Kong for a blouse I would like to make and my daughter brought me a 1980's Ralph Lauren tweed jacket she picked up in a vintage shop in London that sat around for months waiting for the skirt to make way.
Finally, I tackled the jacket, hoping to turn this, with its enormous shoulders, relatively high lapel fold and boxy cut:
into something closer to this 2013 iteration from Ralph, (minus the cutaway effect, which asks too much of my zipper and tummy area.)
Once I had opened up the jacket through the center lining seam, I realized that someone had been here before me, and that they'd made an amateurish job of hand-stitching into the shoulders after removing the gigantic pads we all wore back in the late 80's.
It took an afternoon of basting, pressing and testing,
Lowering the lapel fold loses one buttonhole which I'll handstitch closed and disguise with an Annie Hall brooch or scarf/pashmina.
I might still go back inside and try to reduce the armhole around the lower sleeve but for now, I think its a big improvement. (I hesitated to cut down the armholes all the way around, as there simply is no way with a seam margin of only 10 cm on a size 14 to get it down to a size 12 under the arm without some tension in movement)
I don't know what my daughter spent in the London vintage shop, but I'm sure it was less than Ralph is asking for the 2013 edition above.
