Homemade Dress Form

I’m so doing this before I make my next tricky-to-fit medieval outfit.

alleycatscratch.com/lotr/mak … tDummy.htm

A-ha! That’s where it went. Thanks, I’ve been looking for this link for a while. :slight_smile:

If you’re planning a really formfitting torso (ie. no bra, and the clothing does the support work), lie on your back when you’re taping the, er, upper front, and any portions of the body which may or may not be affected by gravity will, er, sit well.

[quote=“theamazingcatherine”]…

If you’re planning a really formfitting torso (ie. no bra, and the clothing does the support work), lie on your back when you’re taping the, er, upper front, and any portions of the body which may or may not be affected by gravity will, er, sit well.

…[/quote]

My wife Kelsie has done a lot of 14th century clothing that is very form fitted and laced up the back. The dress does all the support work that later corsets and eventual bras do.

She found the trick was to essentially make the dress fitted, with all the lacing done, and then take in the side seams until it supported. Fortunately, 14th century have 4, 6, or 8 panels, so there are a lot of seams you can take in a cm or two on.

I used basted on lacing strips for that part. Horribly messy, but easier to shift if I wanted to alter the line of the lacing.

Oh, and if you’re using the garment as support, make the underbreast area tighter than the upper - avoids the dreaded quadroboob.

The what?

Cloth stretches more on the bias than on the warp and weft grains. (No brainer, sorry.)

When fitting solid-weave fabrics closely around squishy shapely mammaries, stresses appear all over. It sometimes happens that a warp or weft grain runs from underarm to underarm across the breasts. It doesn’t stretch as the fabric around it, and you can end up with a horizontal dent running right across your maidenly glories, bisecting them to make the appearance of four, four boobs, ah, ah, ah.

Speaking from experience, this really ain’t pretty. There are two solutions that I know of:

  1. Use stretchy or bias cut fabric (and there are reasons why we don’t always want to do this in period costuming…)

  2. Tighten the cloth covering the underbreast so it is at least as tight as that denty line. Looks smoother; gives support. Yayy!

(Right now am researching bliauts, specifically, ways to make the right kind of wrinkles, lor’ help me.)