Bodice Drafting with Technical Drawing

Before I get in to the description of the ins and outs of drafting the bodice block, we also had a meeting with our designer before we even began out bodice block drafting; so I will also record down the feedback and idea discussed in the brief meeting.

To save money and help out actress rather than making a separate corset to go underneath the bodice, the boning will be fit directly into the bodice itself.

The dress we will be making is known as a cut through dress, where it opens at the front and the back of the bodice is directly attached to the skirt. (You will see in later blogs how this vision develops) The bodice and skirt are cut in one, rather than in lots of separate pattern pieces.

 My Interpretation drawing of the Mrs Bennet costume (TECHNICAL DRAWING)

 

The fashion in this period for both men and women was for tight small backs, and so the fashion was cut to help give this illusion.

The designer suggested that to get the right quality of fabric for Mrs Bennett’s character we could also look in curtain shops as well as normal fabric shops.

To also get the right pattern on the fabric we may have to block print flowers over the stripes as it is very difficult to find the right colour of stripes with flowers on top already.

We would also be sourcing the lace and gold trim seen around the collar and sleeves.

Alongside the cut through dress we will be making a chemise and the first skirt that can be seen in the screen shot.

The above images are basic chemise sketches to help give us an idea of what we will eventually be drafting as the pattern for the chemise.

There will be another under skirt that will be sourced for the costume store.

What we make is the first layer of clothing, everything visible to the audience.

Me and this beautiful Lady were double teaming throughout this project. She will probably turn up at other times through this Pride and Prejudice project. She did all of the calculations and I did the pattern construction line. #DoubleTeam

These were the instruction we followed, having taken the measurements of our actress in then morning.
A pattern block always begins with the nape to waist measurement. This is the first line and the rest of the pattern block is built off of this line.

The beginning of a new pattern block end up with you creating a large square or rectangle shape. The pattern block with all construction line generally fit inside of this beginning shape.

Having recently received my shiny new set square, this piece of equipment has become my best friend when pattern drafting.

I love using a set square, it really helps to get perfect right angle corners, making squaring across lines even easier.

the beginning of the instructions con concentrates on the back of the bodice block. Here you can see the beginning of the pattern block construction, then as you get further through the instruction the more of the bodice appears. It is like magic, I love making a bodice block.

As the back of the bodice block comes together, the instructions move on to the front bodice block. It is very important that as you are measuring and drawing lines that you label each new point. I cannot count the amount of time when drawing this one pattern block that I neglected to do this one actions and suddenly I was struggling to know where to be drawing a line too or from. Slowly but surely I learnt from this, and I am sure the more block I draft the more this practice will be ingrained into me.

These two lines are very important and are some of the first lines you draw out, after the rectangle/square shape.
The under arm line helps to place where the arm hole end and the bust lines helps to position where darts will come from and too.
Darts are pretty neat, they help to give shape to a costume whilst pulling in excess fabric. Neat hey?

 

This is what our final bodice block for the front of the bodice. This is only a basic constructed bodice.
To make this more appropriate for our character we will be editing this pattern block, however  this will come later on my blog.
The image below is the same pattern block but still with the construction lines on. Before we can begin editing the pattern it needs to be copied from the original pattern block.
The image above is the tracing of the final pattern block, keeping only the lines needed for the next stage of pattern construction. However the original patter block will not be thrown away. The original is needed to refer back to if their are any questions concerning the way the pattern has been edited, or how it should fit the character.

As explained above, back pattern block with construction lines

         

This is the arm hole. On each pattern block, depending on each person this will look different. Every person is a different shape and size and so pattern block reflect this.
Generally however the arm holes are always scooped.
The arm holes are also made touching when making the first pattern block draft, this helps to make sure the arm holes are the right shape and size to fit correctly in to each other.

If these pattern blocks look odd to you it is because these are half the front and back. The front and back are generally mirrors of each other and so two separate blocks would not need to be drafted, just one half of each the front and back.

So we finished well on time, and had little problems concerning the construction of the basic pattern block. To make sure everything had come out correct it is best to check the waist line of the pattern bloc (not including the drawn on darts) against the actual waist size of the actress.

So in our infinite wisdom we did this. This however made us panic, compared to the waist of the real actress, the waist of our drawn bodice waist was like 8 cm too small.

I know this does not sound a lot, in the costuming world something has gone terribly wrong. 

So my partner and I went over the measurements twice, all of the measurements were correct! Then we found what we thought was the answer, I had accidentally placed a dart half a cm too far in.

Again this sounds like nothing at all, but made a big difference. It brought the waist rather that 8 cm too small, it was 4 cm too small. Again however we were worried.

Finally, we had exhausted all of our options, we asked what to do about what felt like and impossible problem to fix. The answer was simply to take out the back dart. Our lecture simply said that it is not often that you have excess fabric at the back of a person, more often than not it is too much fabric at the front, so by simply taking out the back dart completely, our basic block pattern fit to the right waist measurement.