It's only fitting

One aspect of the sewing lessons I have been taking is figure analysis. Turns out I have a peculiar figure, with a long, thin torso but more significant hips and shoulders. It's a figure that looks nice but it makes it difficult for me to find trousers I can wear and I often find clothes tight in the shoulders. According to my sewing teacher, it's the perfect figure for late Victorian (coincidently, the 1870s is my favourite era for clothes) and she recommended that I try 1950s’ style.

I had made a couple of 50s dresses already but the walkaway dress has its problems and my Ava Gardner dress is too fancy for every day. So I picked up Butterick 6018 and, armed with my new patternmaking skills, set out to make it Fit Properly.

The skirt fit as is but my arms and shoulders were very uncomfortable. The armscye was cutting into my underarm at the front which is a problem I often have (and the reason I can hardly ever bring myself to wear this dress 🙁). I consulted my figure analysis textbooks which basically said that it was impossible for an armscye to not fit properly. Ok... that sounds fake, but ok. I did what the book said and looked for the tell-tale wrinkles indicating other problems that could make it feel like the armscye was wrong. There were none. The bodice looked like it fit perfectly.

After spending an evening in directionless confusion I decided to do a 1cm square shoulder adjustment anyway because I usually need those. The new mock-up hurt less although it made no difference to the cutting into me. It was time for drastic measures. Google offered no advice so I invented an adjustment myself. I lengthened the armscye (front and back) by 2cm just above where it was starting to irritate me.

This might be a real adjustment, it might not be, it might be a good idea, it might be a terrible idea. Copy at your own risk. But it worked for me.

This solved the armscye problem and removed a lot of the puff from the sleeves (I mean, I know ease is a thing, but there has to be a line somewhere). But after this adjustment the top of the sleeve was really tight. Now, arm movement might be a luxury not a necessity, but I thought I could do better than that. So I then did a half centimetre broad shoulder adjustment, which helped, but the sleeve was still tight. My final adjustment was a large upper arm adjustment, done higher up the sleeve than usual. Again, this is probably not the right thing to do to a sleeve after lengthening the armscye, but I didn't want to risk increasing the ease. Now I have a comfortable, custom-fitted 50s’ pattern and I can't wait to sew it up for real.

As far as my patternmaking goes, I want to say that it's great now that I know what I'm doing. I can diagnose a problem, work out the solution and fix it but, given what I've written above, it seems I am still doing a lot of guessing and making things up. But I am more confident with my guessing and it is working out successfully. The patterns resulting from these techniques are ones I have no reservations about and don't continuously think "well, it sort of worked, but I should change this or that next time". I don't know; maybe I just needed to know the rules so I could break them properly.