Draping a Sloper Bodice (sans sleeves)

All my travails with fitting the sleeve/armscye of the Red Fox Vintage dress make me realize I need to understand better how these things are supposed to work.  I can't use the Red Fox Vintage bodice as a sloper if the armscye is screwy, can I?  So, after over five years of sewing clothes, hacking patterns, and altering things, I am ready to make my own sloper so I can make patterns that are right from the start. 

DRAPING

I start by draping myself a bodice sloper.  My research begins online, reading lots of instructions on different blogs and sites (resource list at the end of this post), which gives me a good intro to the concepts.  But soon I realize that I need to pick only one set of instructions (hopefully off-line so I can't distracted by YouTube!), and work through it.  I shall use the book The Art of Fashion Draping (3rd Ed.) by Connie Amaden-Crawford (many thanks to the friend who gave it to me!). 

My dress form is a foamy one, and lacks the "armplate", screws, and other distinguishing marks that more professional forms apparently have.  Who knew?  Since I don't have those markers to follow the book's directions exactly, I do my best by dressing my dummy in my own bra and shirt, adding stuffing, and comparing my measurements to the dummy's.  The distance between bustline and waist is important because I'm shortwaisted, and the dummy is not. 

dress form prepped

1-1:30 Prep front and back panels, by tearing muslin into rectangles, tracing the grain and cross grain, and so on, according to the book's instructions. 

1:40- my first real problem: the bustline is too low on the muslin, and I won't have enough room at the shoulder seam, while having too much room below the waist.  I'm not sure why the instructions told me to mark the bustline half-way down the piece... perhaps it works for normal torsos, but because I'm short-waisted, I need far less fabric below than above the bustline?  At any rate, I stop and re-draw the bustline several inches higher to give myself more stuff to work with. 

bust height wrong

bust height fixed so now I have extra fabric at the top to drape the shoulder and neck

1:42 -  2:30 finish draping the bodice front.  The funny thing is, I have done this much faster in the past (like a half hour!), when I wasn't trying to follow instructions.  But following the instructions really threw me off!  Normally, I'd just let my fingers work, but this time I'm measuring and marking and trying to decipher the terminology in the book!  It took me ages to figure out that every time the author wrote "princess seam" she meant the seam on the official dress form (the type I don't have), not the princess seam I'd be trying to make on the garment!  She also kept referring to a "princess panel", even though the block front is made in one piece, not in panels, so that confused me.  In the end, I had to supplement the book with this helpful pdf, which at least has photos instead of drawings.  My foam dress form, which is squished into a tight-fitting body block, does have princess seams and side seams, but not in sensible places, so I can't use them as markers. 

Front draped

A little ease at the bust... because people breathe!

Using a shirt to figure out shoulder line

My dress form's foam shoulders are exploding out of the tight body, so I can't trust them to give me the right shape. I temporarily dress the dress form in a shirt that fits me well, to mark the position of an armscye that's good for me.  Improvise, adapt, overcome! 

2:30-3 drape back bodice. 

Back bodice in progress

3:30-4 take fabric off and true things up on paper.  I have never done this step, so that is cool!  The most troublesome part is, no surprise, the armscye.  Part of the problem is that I don't know how to use a French curve ruler... and nor, apparently, does anyone online.  I mean, I find how-to videos, but they don't explain how you know where to start and where to start measuring anything with it.  There's a curve, and it has no landmarks.  It seems like it must just be an intuitive thing.  Finally, someone in a video casually mentioned that when you have three points plotted on the paper, you move the French curve around until all three points are on the curved line.  That makes sense, so I try it, and muddle through.  (I think I may be looking for science where there is only art, in the use of the French curve.)

Back armscye good.

Front armscye wonky.

I can't explain exactly what I do to correct the front armscye... it has something to do with cutting along the upper shoulder dart, and pivoting it and... some arcane mystery with the French curve ruler. 

PIN-FITTING THE SLOPER

When I pin the darts closed and try the sloper on, I find two problem areas where I differ from Mimi the dress form.  The back armscye is gaping around the shoulder blade, so I shorten the back. 

Back piece too long above the shoulder blades.

Back with excess pinned out.

The side-front has a weird diagonal fold that I pin out, creating a slightly different shape to the front.  From a side view, it's quite interesting how the two areas correspond to each other: draw an imaginary line diagonally from my shoulder blades down to my belly button... those are the loose areas that I needed to pin tighter... is it my posture?  Anyway, the pin-fitting and corrections take about half an hour. 

Side crease appears in front...

Side crease pinned out.

TOTAL TIME FOR BODICE DRAPE

2 hours 50 minutes

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Draping the sloper's sleeves and skirts must wait for another day!  I'll link those posts once they're up.