Today I’ve got the Fibre Mood Dagny in corduroy to share with you. This pattern comes from edition number 7 of Fibre Mood magazine. Fibre Mood describes this as an “overall dress”. I would call it a pinafore myself.

Pot-AY-toes, Pot-AH-toes!

Now don’t be fooled by these smiling photos – by that cosy looking corduroy and her beguiling mustard charms.

This Fibre Mood Dagny was a colossal pain in the butt to sew.

I like the end garment, but Fibre Mood Dagny felt as though it squeezed every last drop of sewing joy out of me, leaving me a twisted, limp, lifeless, husk of a former sewist.

Ok, upon reading that last sentence, I realise that I probably shouldn’t try to write this blog post a mere few hours after trying to hammer in the hardware on this make left me inclined to toss the hammer out of my fourth-floor bedroom window in frustration.

But, hey, at least you’ll know you’re getting an entirely unsanitised perspective on this sewing project!

My Fibre Mood Dagny

My Fibre Mood Dagny is a size 46, graded to a size 48 around the hips.

The size charts had me a size 44 and 46, at different parts of my body. Looking at the photos on the models in the Fibre Mood magazine, however, I was worried that the style was quite straight and fitted from the hips down.

As my thighs, rather than my hips, are the widest part of my body, I am always wary of having enough room in that area. So I took a guess and went with a 46, grading out to 48 at the hips and down to ensure room at the thighs.

In the end, I would say that the thigh sizing is just spot on, I definitely wouldn’t want it any smaller. But, around the waist area, there are inches too much room for me.

As, however, I wanted to keep things the way they were at the thighs and hips, I couldn’t really play around with the side seams too much to try to fix this. I had a crazy half-arsed attempt at darts, which left me with a highly pronounced butt!

In the end, I went with leaving it as it was but wearing it with the thickest sweater I have ever owned!

Finally size-wise, I also extended the length of the skirt by a couple of centimetres, because I found the sample models in the magazine to be a tad short for my liking.

In terms of fabric, these are made from this wide wale corduroy from Meter Meter.

It’s definitely lovely, except for, you know, the minor fact that all corduroy is the spawn of the devil!!!!!

Read on for some whining…

Hardware woes

I do have some issues with this pattern.

The main one being it’s use of impossible-to-source hardware.

The width of the finished straps on the Fibre Mood Dagny are 50mm. I didn’t think too much about this and just sewed it all up according to the pattern. Then I popped down to my local fabric store to grab the buckles for the straps.

Only to see that they didn’t sell any that were 50mm wide.

So I jumped online, expecting to find some quickly.

Ummm, no.

None of my usual sewing supply stores had 50mm buckles.

Over to etsy I went but no seller based in Europe seemed to have what I needed. It turns out that these kind of overall buckles come in 35mm and 40mm as standard sizes. I did find some 50mm available overseas, but I wasn’t willing to wait weeks and pay import duties.

So I had to unpick and re-do the straps, making them narrower. Which was, frankly, just an unnecessary annoyance. I think that it’s a pretty simple matter to ensure that the details of a pattern are compatible with widely available hardware options.

Tricky hardware sourcing is a major turn-off for me in a sewing pattern. Am I being precious or are you with me?

And, speaking of widely available hard ware options, can I just say that I HATE Prym products!!!!! I purchased jeans buttons from Prym for my Fibre Mood Dagny because I wanted to at least have the same buttons at the top and sides.

The first button installed correctly. The second button looked like it installed correctly, but then promptly fell out the next day.

The four buttons down at the hip? Well, not a single one of them installed correctly. The back part of the button collapsed every time I hit the damn thing with a hammer. So, out of a packet of six jeans buttons from Prym, in the end, I eventually managed to get two installed, the rest were destroyed. And, frankly, I’m terrified each time I wear this Fibre Mood Dagny that the two buttons I did manage to install will pop out!

Seriously, the quality of the buttons was terrible. I compared them to some older Prym jeans button (exact same packaging, but different colour) that I had in my stash and saw that these new ones I bought had a much more “plasticky” feel to the back part, compared to the older pack.

In the end, I had to have mismatched buttons at the top and bottom of my Fibre Mood Dagny cuz there was no way was I buying anymore of that Prym crap. I found some jeans buttons from Blackbird Fabrics in my stash (I only had 4, not 6, which was why I hadn’t used them in the first place), which were of an infinitely better quality than the shit from Prym and gave me no installation headaches at all.

And all of this complaining is even without mention of how damn difficult it was to sew buttonholes with a machine in corduroy in the first place!

My automatic button hole function just doesn’t handle it. After moaning on instagram, I got some potentially useful solutions, although I haven’t had a chance to try them yet.

Plenty of other sewists had resorted to hand sewing buttons in corduroy, whereas others suggested it works out if you manually sew the four sides of the buttonhole separately, rather than relying on the automatic button hole function of your machine (if you have one!).

The other suggestion, which I really like the sound of, was putting some masking tape around the area, to create a smooth surface which won’t accidentally “trip” the button hole foot into thinking it needs to change direction.

All of these suggestions seem far more potentially workable than my eventual approach of pounding the fabric with a hammer (remember, I had one handy thanks to those buttons) in order to make it as flat as possible and then screaming and cussing at the machine until something remotely resembling a buttonhole emerged after several attempts!

And, and wait, there’s still more. Remember when I mentioned that around the waist the Fibre Mood Dagny is really big on me. It turns out I don’t actually need to use these side buttons at all. I could have skipped them entirely and just sewn up the side seams and, on my body, in this size, I could still just pull it on over my head.

So much pain for nothing!!!!!!!!!!

Helen’s Closet York Pinafore

So, I’m going to just be direct here. Although I do like the end product, sewing the Fibre Mood Dagny basically left me wishing that I’d actually sewn the Helen’s Closet York Pinafore instead!!

I had been tossing up between the two patterns for this mustard corduroy. In the end, I chose the Fibre Mood Dagny because, well, I already owned it and because I preferred the bodice view.

But did I prefer it enough to justify all this pain? Not really…

The York Pinafore has no closures and no tricky hardware to source, which, in retrospect, makes it a no-brainer.

Plus, I’ve started doing a lot more cooking lately (I’m trying to eat vegetarian and it has had the surprising impact of making me enjoy cooking sooooo much more!). On the day that I spilled an exploding carton of tomato passata all over my Deer and Doe Culottes, I thought, you know what, I really need to own an apron.

What an adult I’ve become – never thought I would utter such a phrase.

And the York Pinafore also has available an apron expansion pack!!!

So I felt like that realisation was the world telling me that I really should have just sewed the York Pinafore instead of the Fibre Mood Dagny.

But shhh, don’t tell Dagny that I said that. I’m worried that those final Prym buttons will pop off in a rage of jealousy if she hears it!!!

Oh and, finally, a little P.S! If you like to get your blog hits through Bloglovin’, feel free to follow me over there: you can find me here. And you can find me on Instagram here.