March sort of ran away from me and now it is April 😦

unfortunately a combination of training course (getting up 2 hours earlier) and having work done on the house has removed most of my stitching time for March and looks to be taking over April as well.

I have a couple of part way projects I can show you but nothing finished.

The first project is view 2

I think this is the first time I have ever done all views of a pattern, this is going to have a better fit, fingers crossed than the other two versions, these I took extra fabric from the side seams this time I have shrunk the pattern and done a small bust adjustment.

The top half of the pattern is one size too big but the waist and hips are perfect, so I turned to my trusty printer and scanned the front and back bodice pieces then I printed them out at 95%, you can just see on the bottom of the two photos how much I lost, it was about 1/4 inch all round. Then for the SBA there were a few things I needed to do

the first thing I had to do was reinstate the 5/8 seam allowance, then decide where I was going to move the bust dart to on the side.

I closed up the underbust dart and moved it to the side

added a piece of paper to the now side dart.

I then cut up from where the original dart had been to bust point then across to the arm hole, and swung that piece over 1/2 inch, taping the top part down

you can see from the above photo that the centre seam part which hasn’t been changed is now longer than the side seem which has been changed, so you slice across from the middle and shift the centre piece up until it matches the side piece, because the chest is smaller than expected for the pattern there is too much fabric going over the bust and this removes it.

The last step is to move the side dart back to the under bust, slice up the middle of the added paper and the area where the underbust dart was and close up the side dart creating a new smaller dart, add a piece of paper under this to fill in the new dart.

as you can see by the drawn in seam allowance (pencil) this dart is far smaller than the original, all that left to do is to make up a bodice and check the fit.

for a full length bodice it is better to add a skirt to check this, but as all I needed to do was to check the fit around the bust I left it at this.

more hopefully soon