Dart Drama

I went back to the muslin-fitting issue yesterday afternoon and looked at the dress again, and then I had an epiphany. The advice to “increase the dart intake” was only half the answer. That pulls up excess fabric from the sides, but only within the dart. I still had extra fabric length in the side seam above the dart.

Most sewing patterns are drafted for a B-cup bra size. It’s possible to use a larger pattern size with more room around the bust, but that is almost always accompanied by wider shoulders, which results in the top of the garment sliding around annoyingly instead of staying put. The key is to choose a size based on the “high bust measurement”—the measurement a few inches above the bust—and make a full bust adjustment. I will refer you to this excellent tutorial so that I don’t have to redraw all the steps. Basically, you slash the existing pattern along several drawn-in lines, leaving the pieces connected with tiny hinges of paper. By moving the separated pieces down and out, you increase the area around the bust without affecting the shoulder width.

One of the things that happens during this process is that the armhole also changes shape. That was the part I was missing as I was making the dart larger. (I know many of these principles, but keeping them all together can be tricky.)

I went back to my pattern piece and made the dart larger, but I also made a corresponding tuck in the armscye.

This is a typical fix for the armhole gap that bustier women sometimes get—pin out the excess in the armhole and rotate it into the bust dart, making the bust dart larger. I’m just doing that in reverse here. Interestingly, I did not have much of an armhole gapping problem in my original muslin or that might have clued me in sooner. (Or not, who knows.) What this also does is to pull up the side of the garment above the dart.

I ran up a quick muslin with this fix. I may have gone too far; I don’t think I need that much of a dart increase but the drag lines did disappear. However, the armhole is much tighter now.

Sarah Veblen’s book has wonderful photos and explanations on making these kinds of alterations on the body, where it’s easier to see what needs to be done, but that’s hard to do without a helper. At one point, I asked the husband to help me pin some things in place, but he’s so worried about stabbing me with a pin that it’s almost easier to do it myself.

Now I just need to find the sweet spot for this adjustment. It’s a good thing I have lots of old sheets.

I wish I had figured this out sooner—like four muslins ago—but going through the process helps to cement it into my brain. (I hope.) Someone out there who has been doing this for decades may be reading these blog posts and cringing at all this thrashing around, but we were all beginners once.

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I signed up for the Mountain Brook painting class again this year. A friend of ours named Lindalee is teaching instead of Sunnie, but Sunnie will be there to help out. I had such fun last year that I thought I would try it again this year. I was supposed to teach that day, but we moved the class to later in the month.

August will be full, but a lot of it is sewing. The pigs go to the processor at the end of the month. And then it will be fall.