Fittings and Final Pattern Adaptation

With the toile and sleeve made it was time for fittings.

There is lots of preparation before during and after fittings to make sure everything goes smoothly.

It is best to only pin the shoulders of a toile so that they can be easily altered if the shoulders are too high or too low.

The sleeve should never be sewn, only pinned on to the toile to make it easier to move around if the arm hole needs to be looser or tighter.

The toile of our garment before the fitting, sat waiting patiently on the stand.

               

Garment on the actress before the fitting

Back view of the toile before fitting adaptations

One of the first adaptations was to shorten the back bodice pattern so that it fit to the actress better, as the original pattern was too long in the body.

The next adaptation was concentrating on the shoulder and sleeve. Bringing the shoulder back wards to give the illusion of a smaller back.

The next adaptation will be to add more fabric to the top of the shoulder to help with ease of movement.

The arm hole on back bodice would also be made deeper.

To make the sleeve fit better to the actresses arm it will be made tighter by a pleat at the bottom.

At the front we will lengthen the bottom of the bodice so that it comes to more of a point, and also take in the front to fit it more closely to the actresses shape.

Together my partner and I decided that we needed to bring the collar at the front down more to fit with the reference pictures more.

With the adaptations the toile started to look like a better more fitted garment.

It was also decided that the dress will look better with pleats rather than gathers.

Along side this we will also be adding an extra line near the middle of the back, an so we will end up with 5 panels instead of 4

With the fittings done; and the designer and actress gone we can get to work on adapting the pattern piece.

To adapt the back bodice piece we taped the bodice back together, then folded up how much the bodice needed to be shortened by.

Having adapted this i drew around the back bodice piece again, drew the new lines, making five panels instead of the previous four.

Before the new panel pieces could be cut out, the arm hole needed to be made deeper, but instead of cutting it away from the pattern it will simply be marked in and sewn on, in case the deeper arm hole then makes the sleeve too tight.

To move the shoulder back towards you have to attach the front and back pieces together by the shoulder and then depending on where it was sketched out on the toile move it backwards that amount. 

In the case of the toile it was move backwards about 4 cm. The new line that was drawn creates the new shoulder and so is cut along the new line to separate the two pieces again.

Here you can also see the deeper arm hole clearly.

Here is an example of what happens when you don't concentrate properly.

Here I was trying to draw around the front bodice pattern again, but instead I ended up drawing the new edited collar around the arm hole.

So I had to begin it all over again having turned the pattern the correct way around.

This is what the front bodice pattern should have looked like, and now does look like. With the front of the pattern also drawn lower.

The next steps with the fabric chosen we move on to more dying samples to try and get a colour that out designer is happy with.