Should we call this one the plunging neckline edition?

Or perhaps the color-block spectacle?

Whatever it may be called, the makes I’m sharing today were born out of fabric love.

When Meter Meter posted a picture of ALL the colours of their batch of heavy washed linen, I just fell in love with blue tones. Not surprising, since I’ve never met a shade of blue I didn’t adore, but I especially fell in love with the idea of using as many of them as possible together!

So, yeah, I bought a metre of each shade of blue and started dreaming up projects to use them together. The tones I purchased are baby blue, smoke blue, peacock, cobalt and my trusty navy!

The linen itself is really love. It is quite heavyweight and has a beautiful texture to, but still remains pretty soft with good drape.

There was a specific color-blocked dress I had been eyeing off on Pinterest for a long time, which became my starting point on this colour blocked adventure!

Taking advantage of the hive mind, I asked on instagram whether anyone had pattern suggestions as to what pattern would be best to hack to achieve a similar effect.

I got some great suggestions, including the Charlie Caftan by Closet Case and the Felix Dress by Grainline.

In the end, however, I realized that there was a dress which I had already sewn which could create a slightly more polished version of the same idea – no hacking required.

Enter the Lois Dress by Tessuti Patterns

See, the Lois Dress has done all the work of creating lovely lines for colour blocking for me!

I have previously sewn the Lois Dress twice – here are here! I still have and wear both of those previous versions – although only on days when I’m willing to keep my belly sucked in!

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I really love the Lois Dress as a pattern. Polished. Midi-length. Minimal fabric use. Cuffed arms. Striking deep V neck.

It’s all good news for me.

As an aside, before sewing the Lois Dress again, I re-read my old blog posts about my previous Lois Dreses. Cuz, you know, surely if there is anyone out there capable of learning from my old blog posts, it’s me. I was struck by how, at that time, I was really wanted to get a very close, fit, nice – very cinched in at the waist.

I played with the dart size and even added in a back dart in order to achieve that last time.

Now, well, I don’t know if it’s just social isolation speaking, but give me breathing room, please! My priorities have changed somewhat! I just wanna be comfy!!!!!

For this Lois Dress, I have sized up to a size 14 (my previous versions were sizes 10 and 12 respectively). Actually, if I’m being technical about it, this is “as close as I could muster to a 14”. I had somehow only kept the size 10 pattern and could not contemplate re-printing it. So this is my own redrawing of the 10 into more-or-less a 14.

Yep, it’s all precision sewing over here!

My modifications to the Lois Dress

For this version, I skipped the side zip. Having sewn two previous versions, I knew I could still fit in on without including any closure. The joys of an A-cup.

Speaking of which – yes, this dress still results in occasional flashing of the bridge of my bra.

No, I don’t actually care.

Given the precise lines, I definitely didn’t feel confident to accurately alter the neckline to change this and, honestly, I feel that the daring plunge is one of the things which is so compelling about the dress. At least it’s modest compared to that Vogue one with the plunging neckline!

The only new modification I made this time around was adding patch pockets. A girl needs pockets, after all! I used the curved pockets from the Fiore Skirt by Closet Case Patterns – as I felt that they complemented the Lois Dress nicely.

I think that’s about all I have to say – except that, you know, I love this dress!

If you want more details about sewing the Lois Dress, I suggest you check out the previous posts which are linked above, they include more details.

Of the linen colors I have, I skipped the peacock blue and used the other 4 shades of blue on this one. In person, I found that the peacock and cobalt were a bit difficult to use together, so I only used 4 of the 5 colors I had.

In all honesty, I probably would have done the back panel in navy as well, if I had had enough of it.

I had originally modified the Lois skirt piece, in fact, so that I could have diagonal panels and put all 5 colors of the linen together. Then I showed my husband my painstaking work hacking the pattern and his response was “ummm, I reckon less is going to be a bit more on this one!”.

And yes, he was totally right.

So, lesson learned is that just cuz I have all the blues doesn’t mean I have to use them all together.

Most of the blues is perfectly sufficient!

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Pinnacle Top by Papercut Patterns

The other pattern I had in my stash which had been calling out for some colour-blocked action is the Pinnacle Top by Papercut Patterns.

For this one, I went with the baby blue, smoke blue and peacock linen colours.

My Pinnacle Top is variation 1 (woven, v-neck) in a size large.

And I love the final product.

But, can we talk a bit about the pattern?

I remember reading Sewing Like Mad’s amazing post about the problems with Papercut’s Sapporo Coat pattern and it blew my mind the way that, with her technical wizardry, she was able to set out so clearly all the problems which existed in the pattern.

The problems that many hundreds of sewists had encountered but thought “it’s probably me, I must have messed things up somewhere”.

When I started googling the Pinnacle Top before sewing it, I found lots of people seemed to be experiencing issues when making it in a woven, in relation to getting the diagonal lines to line up where they should once the facing is attached.

And, well, yeah, I had these issues too!

Despite all my attempts to google errors or mistakes in the Pinnacle top, I didn’t find the actual solution anywhere.

So I forged ahead anyway!

Pinnacle top – v-neck woes

My Pinnacle Top was looking all lovely – diagonal lines perfectly aligned and meting in a nice pinnacle. Until I attached the facing.

At this point, as I have seen others point out, the notches of the facing to the neckline did not match. And, once the facing was attached, those pretty diagonal lines simply did not end at the peak of my v-neck.

Ultimately, the reality is that it’s likely that “only a sewist will notice it”, but this doesn’t actually make it OK!

And, despite the fact that I searched for a solution before even starting to sew this, I didn’t find one until just a couple of days ago – after I’d sewn this Pinnacle top – in all it’s imperfect glory.

Amanda over at Bimble and Pimble also blogged about the Pinnacle Top this week and her blog post mentions that in January 2020, Papercut have acknowledged that there is an error in the Pinnacle Top pattern – apparently 1 cm needs to be removed from the centre front of the facing piece.

Amanda’s blog post bought my attention, for the first time, that an ‘Errata’ page even exists on Papercut Patterns’ website. And I have to say that I’m not really sure that this meets my expectations of how errors in patterns should be addressed. With other indie pattern companies, I have received email notifications when a pattern I have purchased electronically has an error in it. This enables me to actually be aware of the issue.

As I mentioned above, I did plenty of googling terms like “problems pinnacle top”, none of which led me to the Papercut errata page which actually held the answer. It certainly never occurred to me that I should have scoured the Papercut Patterns website for errata before starting to sew. Indeed, if you go to the page where you buy the Pinnacle Top on Papercut’s website (a logic place for anyone seeking information about the pattern), there is no mention of or link to the errata.

I gotta say I also found the flippant tone of the hard-to-find errata page a tad irritating. It states: “Unfortunately, our humans sometimes make mistakes. It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally a pattern may need tweaking and that’s when we offer our team more coffee.”

I understand that mistakes can be made – but making light of it along the lines of “our team just needs more coffee” downplays, in my view, the impact of these errors on sewists.

Taking this top for example, I paid about 10 euros for the pattern, the same price to copy shop print it and then there’s about 45 euros worth of linen in this Pinnacle top. So I’ve already lost 65 euros, not including the value of my 3-4 hours labour that I’ve put into the project.

A mistake in a pattern can cost a sewist a hell of a lot more than just the price paid for the faulty pattern.

IMHO, at least have the respect for everyone who has potentially ruined a garment by using your faulty pattern to just lay it out like it is, without trying to be cute about it.

And look, since I’m ranting anyway, I’ve gotta say that I’ve always found that Papercut Patterns have very “light” instructions. They don’t actually meet the hand-holding expectation that I have of indie sewing patterns, which I consider to be a premium product. For example the instruction for sewing the v-neck of the Pinnacle Top consists of 11 sentences. And that counts “Press.” and “Stitch together.” as one sentence each!

In contrast, the tutorial on the Closet Case website for sewing the v-neck on the Charlie Caftan is about 1400 words.

I reviewed this useful tutorial before sewing my Pinnacle Top, which shows the process in meticulous detail and also included pretty vital steps which are missing from the Pinnacle Top instructions, like, you know, perhaps stay stitch your neckline?

But, while Closet Case no doubt helped me to improve my result compared to if I’d tried to follow the Pinnacle Top instructions alone, it obviously can’t make up for the fact that I was working with a facing piece which was simply the wrong size!

So, grrrrr, really, not much else I can say.

(*****UPDATE***** 28 January 2021 Since I posted this, Papercut Patterns have provided updated corrected pieces to the pinnacle top which you can access by downloading from their site: you can find the information here. There are apparently better instructions for getting the point right, although I have yet to try them – can’t say I’m in a rush to return to this pattern!)

You know, I really love the designs of Papercut Patterns – they are consistently interesting enough to keep me coming back.

But, being totally honest, I find their instructions consistently sparse and weak. I also wonder whether their patterns are fully proofed and tested, since I’m not the only one in the sewing community who seems to have problems.

Do damn you tempting designs! I know I’m going to have problems but they’re just so good!

So, yeah, I’m just choosing to vent all my frustration here, as a form of catharsis, which will now enable me to let it all go and just concentrate on actually enjoying this Pinnacle Top, for all its flaws.

Cuz it is still pretty colour-block-rific!

And, plus, I’ve always got the Lois Dress to console me. This Tessuti beauty caused me no grief whatsoever!!

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.