I’ve seen the Dior dart described as a way to have a princess seam that’s further toward the side of the garment rather than running over the bust point, which makes sense to me.
I’ve done a bunch of two-part experimentation now, which has resulted in the below. I can’t get rid of any more of the dart because shortening it any further would make it impractical to sew.
(I was puzzled for ages about why I can’t just keep shortening the dart until it’s not there any more, but then I realised there’s actually a singularity at the dart point — as the dart gets shorter and shorter, there’s less and less length at the fabric edge to deal with the dart angle in, and even setting aside practical considerations, you can’t keep reducing that to zero because then you’d be trying to make a triangle with a side of length zero. And if you don’t close up the dart angle, then you end up having to sew a straight seam on the undersleeve to a seam with a sharp bend in it on the upper sleeve, whereas with the dart closed, both seams are straight and the same length.)
That jacket of yours does sound tricky to repurpose. I guess you could cut it into rectangles and layer them to make a kneeling pad, but that’s no use unless you actually need one. If it’s just the neckline you dislike, could you cut out the neckline area, piece in some new fabric (cut off the bottom if you don’t have any left — a short jacket is better than no jacket), and make a completely new neckline? The piecing line would show, but maybe you could make it look purposeful.
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I’ve done a bunch of two-part experimentation now, which has resulted in the below. I can’t get rid of any more of the dart because shortening it any further would make it impractical to sew.
(I was puzzled for ages about why I can’t just keep shortening the dart until it’s not there any more, but then I realised there’s actually a singularity at the dart point — as the dart gets shorter and shorter, there’s less and less length at the fabric edge to deal with the dart angle in, and even setting aside practical considerations, you can’t keep reducing that to zero because then you’d be trying to make a triangle with a side of length zero. And if you don’t close up the dart angle, then you end up having to sew a straight seam on the undersleeve to a seam with a sharp bend in it on the upper sleeve, whereas with the dart closed, both seams are straight and the same length.)
That jacket of yours does sound tricky to repurpose. I guess you could cut it into rectangles and layer them to make a kneeling pad, but that’s no use unless you actually need one. If it’s just the neckline you dislike, could you cut out the neckline area, piece in some new fabric (cut off the bottom if you don’t have any left — a short jacket is better than no jacket), and make a completely new neckline? The piecing line would show, but maybe you could make it look purposeful.