How not to do it

The horror, the horror

A bit of a wordy post this week, as it's mostly a cautionary tale.

Despite everything that's going on, I have been trying to carve out a little time to work on Butterick 7729 for this year's Shirtwaist September. So far I have attempted, and failed, to redraft the bodice to fit me. My old method of shortening a bodice by 5cm/2" all round no longer works, so I began by making a toile with the pattern unchanged except for adding an extra ¼" width to each piece - i.e. 1" in total - to match my actual measurements. The end result was too long, of course, but also weirdly baggy at the sides and with too-wide shoulders. Also, the bust dart was oddly short, and the waist dart was very long indeed, which produced an alarmingly pointy effect.

So much going wrong here

At this point I decided to try taking out the extra width and replacing it with a full bust adjustment. I had sort of tried this years ago, and the end result had more or less matched the alterations I had already made to the pattern, so my memory had somehow filed this half-hearted attempt under 'roaring success'. This, along with currently needing to grab my spare time where I find it, may explain my decision to plough on with the redraft even though it was getting very late.

This was not a good idea. I can't post a picture of the end result because it was so obviously unusable that I just scrunched it up, binned it, cursed a bit, and went to bed. And then I left well alone until I had enough free time to try again, properly.

The first thing to consider was the darts on the original pattern piece. The waist darts sloped inwards a little from the waist to the bust, and the bust darts sloped slightly downwards. Neither slope was pronounced enough to suggest a definite design choice, so I guess they were just badly stamped out. Ah, the joys of unprinted patterns. Either way, this hadn't helped my first attempt at the FBA process, so this time I rotated the darts slightly to properly vertical and horizontal. Next, I shortened the bodice pieces in line with the amounts I had folded up on the first toile, and then I used this tutorial to do the FBA.

I did make one change from the instructions. After spreading the pattern piece, you fill the gaps with spare paper and tape it into place. I discovered on my first attempt that wherever you place the tape, it is always, always, exactly where you need to draw on the pattern later, so this time I flipped it over and did the taping on the wrong side.

Almost ready to fill in the gaps

The end result does at least look like a usable pattern piece.

So now I’ve cut out the pieces for a second toile, and hope to find some time to sew it up tomorrow. But not tonight. I may have finally realised that, night owl though I am, some things should not be tackled in the small hours!