Wrap...For over three weeks now I have been laboring over redrafting the Butterick Walkaway Dress. This dress is the first piece of clothing I have completed for myself... on purpose (I do have several pieces that are now mine by default, because I mistakenly made them too large for the intended recipient, ha!). I have completed three (yes, three) muslin drafts of the Walkaway dress, adding significant inches here, increasing dart size there, and finally on my last draft moving the darts entirely into a new placement. I am tired of trying on the dress in hospital gown off-white muslin (see above). I want a dress that fits in COLOR and in PATTERN. After much labor, I think I have the final draft of the pattern, and I am ready to start the real deal.
It turns out that the trick to making a dress with darts fit a big breasted girl (like me!) is to rearrange the dart placement and make larger darts. The darts were originally designed to gather about 2 inches of fabric from the side center of the chest to a point just off the nipple area. Imagine a perpendicular intersection of lines at the center of each breast, the dart followed these lines. That was the old way.
However, the new dart ignores all the side dart business that resulted in gapage, or "gap-osis" as my momma used to say, and instead utilizes a dart angling down from the armpit to the center of the chest. It is also gathering about five inches of fabric in the dart rather than two inches. The result? None other than a well molded front of the chest that follows womanly curves with minimal gap-osis and puckering. I am excited. I cut the colored and patterned fabric last week and will begin sewing as soon as possible. Progress reports to follow. Wheeeeee.
... and Wear.
1 comment:
You are so right about that gapping issue because I have a dress that gapes open and it's hard for to pinpoint how to handle the problem.
Could you make a small drawing of your solution?
I would like to try it out on my next dress.
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