I will admit that I was totally intimidated by actually tackling fitting, especially doing it by myself, and I was reluctant to ask Scott to assist me with it. Sadly, when I did try to get some help from him the other day, that feeling didn't alleviate. One thing that helped tremendously was the book Fit for Real People. After my first muslin experience and the feedback I received, I decided to try going down a size. As the book recommended, I did a tissue fitting first. I made an adjustment to the pattern for a rounded back and for sloped shoulders, plus I added a little full bust adjustment because the finished size gave me no wearing ease. With these adjustments already completed, I made a muslin. The back was good, but the front was not quite on yet.
After adjusting the shape of the darts, I got rid of some of that extra fabric.
After that, I pinned out some excess fabric on the sides, but I don't have any good photos of that. With a little adjustment of the sleeve shape, that took care of it. Here is the marked up muslin.
I traced all of the new marks. Yes, those are tuna cans that I'm using as pattern weights. They work great, they're not too tall, and they're already in the house.
Clean new pattern fitted to me:
Once that was done, I moved to the next step, which I realized I could have done first! Since I had not pre-treated the fabric, I couldn't continue to cutting yet.
I stitched a zig-zag on all of the cut edges of my fabrics and tossed it in the machine on "hand wash", since that's what may happen to the dress if I am feeling a little lazy about hand washing. After all, it's cotton, not wool, mohair, or anything else prone to felting, nor is it lace. At the moment, I am waiting for the washer before I can continue.
The other thing I must point out is my beautiful new Janome 3160 QDC. I love it! A big thank you to my parents and my grandmother for this Christmas/birthday gift. It sews beautifully - miles above my old machine. Plus, it has many more stitches, from blind hem, to stretch, to automatic button holes and even a few totally decorative stitches with no specific structural use. (I say that because some of the special stitches are decorative even if they're meant to to something else, like smocking, faggoting, or shell edges.) Additionally, some of the other little things are very nice additions that make sewing easier, for example: a needle-threader. The bobbin is also considerably easier to put in, and what is more, it is easy to make sure you put it in right because there is a little diagram right there. The automatic thread cutter was not something I expected to use much, but I actually love it because I don't have to pull out big tails at the beginning of every seam because it holds the cut bobbin thread in place. Genius.
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