Eureka!

So I decided to try a simple fix that was suggested by a couple of people on sewing forums that I'd often thought of but never attempted and that was to take out the excess fabric in the neck area by pinching said amount out of the pattern piece and smooshing the resulting bubble flat...just mash it down.  When I was looking at this smooshed bit, I looked over at the armhole and though....why don't I slash and pivot and allow that bubble to escape into the armhole. It has seemed a bit small to me anyway, and I thought, why not...as someone said to me some designers made dozens of muslins before getting the fit they wanted...I'm just after a flat neckline!  So I did it and it looked fine...

,,,then I made bodice muslins out of them and do a comparison. Here's a side by side collage of  Opt #1-right side (smooshed pinch), and Opt #2-left side (pivoted neckline to underarm):

I remind myself that this is a  workdress and isn't supposed to fit without some bagging and excess fabric here and there, beside the fact that weight from the skirt will sort some of this out....but it does make me want to play with the pattern more....that's for the future. Right now, I'm really pleased with the flat neckline and the ease with which the dress seems to fit. I won't feel that I can't scrub some linens and sit and the spinning wheel doing some longdraw spinning and worrying about gaping necklines or a constrictive fit! Weeeee.

Playing with Pattern Alteration

Clothing has seldom fit me the way I would like it to. We all have this problem because one size just doesn't fit all.  In my last post I put up some pictures of an historical pattern I'm trying to get to fit me. The pattern is fine except for some gaping at the neckline that I want to get rid of. I don't want to hide it I want it gone.

I've played around a little bit with getting a pattern to fit me, even had a class that taught me quite a bit, but this fix seems to be a bit more of a challenge and not an uncommon one...gaping fabric at the neckline.  The bodice on this dress has a 1.5" gaping at the neck front. That's a lot. Now, granted, this pattern is taken from a 1870's workdress that most probably didn't fit any better than this does me, but it fits me so well everywhere else there just must be a way to get that gaping out so the button band lays neatly against my chest front.

I've taken some suggestions and tried some slash and pivot techniques, but I'm really in a completely new arena here, I'm just unsure of what I'm supposed to be doing. 

So the suggestion was to take a pleat in the neckline taking out the excess fabric there. Slash the pattern down to the underbust pleasts and let the excess fabric from the reduction in the neck land there...easy enough to deal with by taking the pleats in a little more or adding another one...but then what does one do with the changes in the pattern lines at the neckline, armscye and waistline...let me show you what I mean.

I've made the pivots keeping the Center Front on the straight of grain.

So what does one do at this point? Do we true up those changes in the neckline and the armscye? Or does that put one back to where we were at the start...this may seem a really silly question, but when you're only grasping the concept by the outside edges...it's really not all that silly :). 

So that's where I stand to date, still working on it...