I have quite a nice dress makers dummy it is one of the ones with the dials on it to make it bigger and smaller, and I bought the one you could do trouser fitting on it.

  
I got it last year, I’d always wanted one so I bought one, I quite quickly found the major downside to it, the shoulders, with the mainly 1950s dress I was making it was fine right up until I put in that pesky second side seam in, if the dress was big enough to go over the shoulders of the dummy it was too big in the chest for me, and even if it didn’t go over the shoulders it was more than likely to be too big in the chest.

It was then I found out about dummys with collapsible shoulders (drool) I searched the net, I found out about wolf (very expensive) and PGM (not quite so expensive) but still in America so even if they would export to the UK you were looking at adding another £200 for shipping and import duty.

Then I found out about Kennett and Linsell goody, I thought, they are in the UK not sure why my google searches didn’t find them, but it must be cheaper to buy from here than the States (wrong!!!!)as far as I can work out as they don’t have any prices listed it costs about £700 for one of these dummys. This is going by the Clearance list, and an auction on ebay.

So back to the drawing board, not so much, I got so fed up with the shoulders I sliced them off, not totally obviously, otherwise I’d have nothing to hang my shoulder seams on, I hacked about an inch off of both sides, hacked might even be too kind a word for it, I started off with a pair of scissors and ended up with a craft knife, it wasn’t pretty when I finished, and now there were sharp bits. 😦

   
 So off to the back room where we had a few bags of clothes waiting to go to the charity shop, Simon had put a couple of t-shirts in there, ideal, they would be nice and long and I’d have some fabric to play with.

  
I stitched the sleeves up and took the t-shirt in using my overlocker, why not get a feel for knits at the same time as trying to make my dressmakers Dummy actually usable.

  
Here is the finished article it still has enough shoulder to hang a dress from, but it is missing just enough that I can get my 1950s dresses on it, still with a struggle but less chance of splitting the under arm seam.