New Dress Forms Are Great, continued...

A little while ago, I made a lovely bolero for Bloomeenee, out of a piece of barkcloth fabric that she sent to me.

On my old dress form, it looked like this:

On Bloomeenee, it looked like this:





Bloomeenee has now ordered a new bolero, and would like it to be a slightly different shape from the first one. My usual bolero jackets are cut away very high at the front, so that they emphasise your bust and draw attention to your waist. (They look great with a corset, by the way!) Bloomeenee has asked for her new bolero to provide a little more coverage at the front. This, of course, is the advantage of having things custom made for you - I can make the new bolero any shape that Bloomeenee wants!

However, getting the right shape using my old dress form would have been tricky, to say the least. I would have made a mock-up, sent it to Bloomeenee to try on, and it probably would have taken at least three incarnations to get the new shape exactly right. Now that I have a new dress form which I can simply dial to Bloomeenee's size, I can show her what I plan to do:



The left hand ribbon shows the shape of the original bolero. The right hand ribbon shows the proposed new shape. Bloomeenee can now ask me to make adjustments before I make the mock-up, which increases the chance that when I send it over to her, it might actually fit first time! Obviously I'll still be going through the mock-up stage, to make sure that the new shape fits nicely on Bloomeenee herself, but having this new dress form makes the whole process a lot more accurate.