Major pattern surgery Part 2

Right after I wrote that last post, I felt the urge to get pattern altering... So, I pulled out and traced the paper pattern, started cutting this black striped synthetic fabric that hasn't been calling to me at all (this is a trial garment, after all) and got sewing.

As you may recall, I had wanted to do 3 things:

1. Remove crotch pointing front

Relatively straight-forward. I merely overlaid the front center and front side sections with the corresponding back sections, and traced out the back lines instead. (Since this is a princess seam - there's a center front, and a side front pieces to alter.)

2. Widen and lower neckline

Also straightforward.

3. Raise the armhole thingy to be tighter

This one was not at all straightforward, and I have to say, I was mostly guessing as I was doing this.

First, I read this informative post from Dawn on raising armholes

It all made sense. And then I looked at mine.

Unfortunately, with the way this bodice is constructed, the armhole thingy is formed when you join the center and side sections of the bodice, rather than in one section only.

Also, for some reason that still eludes me, the sleeves were not the standard one-piece sleeve, but had front and back pieces.


I started with the sleeves. My goal was to remove bagginess, and decrease the armhole diameter.

Original lines are in blue and black - my alterations are in red. On all pattern pieces, I removed the seam allowance, did the altering, and redrew the seam allowance, to ensure I was accounting for the seam allowance correctly.

Back sleeve:




Altered back sleeve - compared with original back sleeve:



Bodice alterations - center front:



Side back (I'd show side front, but I forgot to take a picture. Its pretty much the same thing though.)



Having done all that, I decided it would make sense to sew the thing up, to see if I was even close on the alteration. (I also decided to play with grain a little, after remembering examples of it by Cidell and Threads)

Here's the bodice, sewn up:



Trying it on, the armhole thingy was still too large, though it fit reasonably well at bust and below. I took another inch and a half off, leading to the final bodice.



In the next post, I'll show you the disaster that happened when I attached the horrendous sleeves and the skirt.