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.

That's more like it!

Here I present Part One of an occasional series: Everything Looks Better On The Right Size Dress Form.

The top two dresses are actually for sale, but I've never managed to get a decent photograph of them. (I'm still not certain that I've managed it, but at least I have a dress form to practice on now!)

The star dress measures bust 34", waist 30".
It's made from a top layer of iridescent mesh with a metallic star print, and it's lined with plain black poly cotton. The under layer is knee length, and the longest points of the outer layer are ankle length. The top layer of the skirt is a full circle.
£50.

The pink taffeta dress measures bust 34", waist 32", hips 42".
It's made from pink embroidered taffeta, and lined with poly cotton. It has a matching embroidered organza drape at the front, and a gathered detachable bustle at the back.
£75.

The teal dress is from Simplicity pattern 3673, view C. I made it to take to my sister's wedding, as I had a last minute crisis of confidence about whether I would fit into my bridesmaid's dress or not! Thankfully I didn't need to wear it, so I saved it for Christmas instead. It's made from a heavy polyester crepe suiting, and lined with poly cotton again. I only made one minor adjustment to the pattern, and that was to let out the six darts at the front. They fit beautifully at the back, but as my waist is slightly larger than this style of dress dictates, it turned out to be a very simple solution to change the front darts into pleats, to allow myself a bit of extra breathing room. Oh, I also eliminated the centre front seam by cutting the piece on a fold instead. This is my new favourite dress, I think. You can wear it alone, or with a t-shirt underneath, and it takes less than three metres of fabric. Perfect!

The elasticated skirt is made from an Alexander Henry print, featuring birds in a "paint by numbers" design! My camera wasn't too happy about the bright red colour, but if you click through to Flickr you can see a couple of views. this is simply the long version of my regular elasticated skirts, and I will be adding this to the shop very soon. The price will be £40. What you can't see from these photographs is how full the skirt is. It hangs nice and closely to the body when it's worn, but the hem measures approximately 85" around, so it's beautifully flowy when you move. It's 33" long excluding the waistband and trim; 36" long in total.


That's better!

The weather's been so wet and miserable here lately that I haven't been able to go out and have Paul take photographs of me, and the teal dress and elasticated skirt looked absolutely terrible on my old dress form. I'm delighted about the new ones!

The girls are here!

My two new dress forms arrived on Friday while I was at work - many thanks to my poor neighbour, who kindly kept the two giant parcels for me all afternoon!

The measurements are in centimetres which is a bit of a culture shock - I'm going to have to re-measure myself now, as I have absolutely no idea what my dimensions are in metric!

The ladies are now fully assembled, and show below at their absolute minimum and maximum sizes.

The size range that I can now accommodate on my dress forms is as follows:

Bust 84-116cm (33-45½")
Waist 65-95cm (25½-37½")
Hips 91-120cm (36-47")

This represents (very roughly) UK dress sizes 10 to 24.

Obviously, if your measurements fall outside of these size ranges, I can still accommodate your needs, just as I could before I had two shiny new dress forms to play with!

A dress form bargain!

Today I have bought not one, but two dress forms, for the bargain price of £176!

This week I have gone back to work part time at my local fabric store. The staff discount is already good (and therefore dangerous - I still have fabric that I bought the last time I worked there!), but for this week only it was increased as a special offer, so I took the opportunity to grab myself a genuine bargain.

They are both "Diana" dress forms, as shown below, which normally cost around £115-£130 each. They come with hem markers, and have an eight-part adjustable body. I particularly like the way that the waist height is adjustable, as I'm very short-waisted, so that's important if I want to make anything which fits me!

I've bought two sizes, so that I can show a larger range of the clothing that I make.

Size A covers UK dress sizes 10-16, and size B covers sizes 16-22. The majority of the custom work that I've done this year has fallen somewhere within the size B range, so it will be really nice to be able to display dresses properly, without them hanging off my wonky old mannequin.