On the Lyris Dress Shop discussion group recently, I saw a post about the grain line of the princess dress not being where it should be and because of that the dress doesn't hang correctly. Since I can't go back and reread the comment, I am relying on my memory (and heaven knows I could be totally incorrect about this!) How can I do a correction for this problem (if it truly is a problem)? Is there a good reference I can turn to about princess styles? Thanks, Rose Marie

The grainline of the side panels should almost sit perfectly between both seams. Unfortunaley the pattern will not draft that way. If you add any flare to it, and I truthfully like at least 20% to a street length dress, rather than the default 12%, it adds almost all the flare to the side seams, rather than distrubuting the flare amongst all the pattern pieces.

Set up DS for a flared armhole princess. In the default view it shows mostly on the back side panel, although the front side panel is malformed as well. See how the grainline is almost parallel to the inside seam? The grainline should be almost balanced perfectly between the two seam lines of the side panels. You'll also notice if you click on the skirt tab and add at least 20% flare, how it adds it to the side seams and not evenly to the other pieces. The more flare you add, the worse the grainline gets, and the side seams hang at an awful bias.

This problem is known by the programmer, yet he refuses to take the time to fix it. As far as I'm concerned, and many others I've conversed with on this particular problem, the princess is a classic, and should be one of our core dress patterns that should work properly.

The solution I've been given instead, is to take a pencil and redraft the pattern and grainlines. I'm sorry, I've spent well over a $1000 on this program to do that much hand drafting.

I have found a program that WILL draft the princess properly, and you could probably overlay the pattern pieces to fix this issue. Only had to spend $25 for this one.

Sue