Yes, you read correctly. My fourth Aeolian. This one, like the last, is a dress. But this time it’s a knit dress rather than a woven. And a little shorter.
I made a Medium, as before, and took quite a deep hem to bring the dress up to above the knee. The fabric is a striped knit from Clear It, so it was possibly from a Gorman or similar range some years ago. And yes, it’s striped. And stripes mean stripe matching.
Now you will have to take my word for it that the stripes match along the side seams and sleeve seams. They do. But check out the matching across those curved raglan sleeves at the back! Go me! Now, let’s check out the stripe matching along the curved raglan sleeves at the front!
Um, not so much. In fact, not at all. Although they are balanced and symmetrical, and they do line up nicely. The sleeves are cut on grain, so the hemlines are also straight and along a stripe. But it’s just not possible to match slightly curved raglan seams in a way that the stripes will match perfectly, not unless the seam is at an exact forty-five degree angle. (We know this for a fact now – Gabrielle got the graph paper out and checked it when I put one of these photos up on Instagram). And it’s the lovely shaping of the raglan sleeves and the overall drafting that makes this boxy tee/dress such a successful shape. So let’s just call those mismatched stripes at the front a design feature, in addition to the twin needle topstitching along the edge of the raglan sleeves.
And if you really do want matching stripes along the raglan seams of an Aeolian, I suggest that you match up the front ones rather than the back ones and use an exposed back facing to distract from the mismatched ones on the back, or else do the back in a solid. Or you can do what I am doing in my next Aeolian and use a double-faced stripe that has wider stripes on one side and narrower ones on the other…
