My Friend, the Dress Form

I spent the entire day today working on my body duplicate. I think I came pretty close. As you will see from the first muslin, there is much room to subtract before I have a skin tight duplicate, picture of which I will spare you and myself, although those jeans don't leave much to the imagination. 

This is made from Vogue's Muslin pattern, Vogue 1004. This is a sloper to be used to check fit on your Vogue patterns. In my case it was made without any ease in order to duplicate my body. If I went by the pattern measurements I would have taken a size 12. But I have never worn a twelve pattern in my life. I used a size eight. The interesting thing is the skirt part of my dummy fit perfectly out of the envelope in that size eight. The top was made much smaller to accomodate a narrow ribcage and shoulders. So the eight was just fine for me. If you use this pattern for a dummy get it two sizes smaller than the measurements suggest unless you have broad back issues or such.

You can see above it is large at the start which it should be if it is a sloper. The interesting thing is that once I started substracting fabric the shoulders and waist ended up exactly where they needed to be. I like that I ended up with one shoulder lower than the other, a true copy of my asymmetry, which you can see even in the above pic.

The process? I began by cutting out the size 8 exactly as it was on the pattern, not doing any of my usual changes. I used big stitches, the easier to rip out and I added a zipper up the back. First I tucked out vertical adjustments. Then I tucked out the horizontal ones as in an FBA. I had to move the "bust box" down a tad and I made a dart at the center front, between my two apexes. By the time it was all tucked and pinned in the strangest fashion, making the thing look plastered on me, I took it off. Then I rotated those tucks into darts and cut  princess seams on the front and back to accommodate some of the rotation.  My plan was to first make the bodice and then do the skirt separately. Once all stitched up, separately, I would try them on to find the final waistline and do any further tweaking, at last that is the plan for now.

I took the thing off and cut off all seam allowances.  Just to back track, before I started sewing,  all horizontal balance lines and straight of grain lines were marked in.  OK, back to cutting off the SAs. I then traced everything to oaktag, added back the seam allowances, cut my toile ( get it?) and started sewing.

I have been sewing all day. I had a decision to make before starting full bore on this project. Did I want to make it in good ole muslin or how about something a litte prettier? I found a home dec toile at JA's and thought it would be perfect and pretty. I cut it all out and other than the side seams, which I am leaving undone to get the zipper in, the bodice is complete. I will finish the skirt tomorrow and hopefully start stuffing this babe. I am in mortal fear of what this will really look like. So far, no surprises, as my hips really are much wider than my upper bone structure. But will it be one of those dress forms that will have a piece of fabric thrown on it all the time so I don't have to face what I look like? We shall see........Bunny