Interim report - Dress form

 WISDOM GAINED: Pattern companies are not infallible!

I wish I had procured a dress form before now. But I guess it is only recently that I am becoming more careful about proper fitting. And I don't yet know if this will be a success! 

early stages

A number of years ago, when making a dress for a niece's wedding, I came across a blog post where the sewist had made the same dress that I was making. It is a lovely pattern, (Vogue 1182, see right) and I just made it straight from the envelope. "Kay the sewing lawyer" (who coincidentally also happens to live in Ottawa, be a swimmer, and probably lives within a few km of me) had made the dress for her 'PR weekend' in Montreal.

I was awestruck by her careful fitting and adjustments of this dress, and it looked fabulous. At the time I thought the PR weekend was a weekend in Montreal to recruit clients for her law practice; I was not yet familiar with the wonderful world of Pattern Review (thus PR). (Here is her review of that dress, just to show how meticulous she is!)  Just recently I came across her again when looking at review of the bootstrap dress form. A common complaint about this pattern is that while the measurement might be right, sometimes the distribution is not (I suspect that the breasts on my dress form will be much ... younger looking than on the prototype - me!). Somehow she eyeballed her pattern, and was able to make changes to it to make sure it resembled her. There was no way I was going to be able to do that - there are eight or so flat pieces which come together to make a 3D model - I have no idea what they will come out to until I begin stuffing them!

nearly done!

So I am stuck with whatever comes out of this. I am optimistic, in spite of some of the inconsistencies with the instructions! The main problem was that sometimes they were superspecific, then elsewhere steps were missed. And why is this a problem? Well one figures if steps 1 - 3 were superspecific, then I must be doing something wrong here where things are not mentioned. This is where I just had to take time, and go with my gut. What makes sense here? Or - so what if the armhole is a bit smaller. (But in retrospect, I wish I had cut out a bit from the armscye rather than move up the cover.

I was excited to buy a sponge that is pretty much an exact replica of the neck. No need to cut a sponge down to size. This one, stuffed into the neck, is compressed to a perfect fit!

I am pretty much done the shell. The armhole covers gave me grief: the pieces did not seem to fit for me. Sewing curves can be challenging, but I had managed the top of the neck with no issues, and have sewn cruves before. You have to line up the stitching lines, and not the edges, and this often means a lot of folds that can get caught, and it means snipping the concave piece to help those stitching lines meet. Well in this case there was no meeting of the stitching lines, so I ended up moving the stitching line of the armhole cover up a bit, which made the hole a bit smaller. Then I had to trim the cardboard inserts... 

I have sewn in the inner support piece, and my next step is to put the zips on the two pieces of the base cover and attach it. THEN the fun part. Stuffing it. I have progress reports to write this weekend, but hopefully I can make time to do these next steps. And to find a stand or base of some kind. A coat rack or out of use post-lamp....

the base piece

PS: I am going to try to give a  regular shout-out to other people's work, as I did here with Kay.