Dress 1--Altering The Bodice

I spent time this afternoon making adjustments to the bodice front and back of Advance 8524. First I made a copy of the original pattern with newspapers and after taking more measurements I decided that I needed to add seven inches around the body and one inch in torso length.

That is a lot of body circumference to add to a pattern so I know that these are the first of many adjustments. I split the seven inches between the front and back, and since I worked with half the bodice pieces, I needed to add 1 3/4" to each piece to get a total of seven inches. I divided this into two separate splits--the shoulder area between the darts and the neck area between the waist dart and the center front. Here is the bodice front. The pink lines show where I added width to the pattern, and the green lines are the bodice length adjustment.

You can see that the darts were minimally affected by these adjustments. I strongly suspect that I will need to lower the armhole and probably adjust the darts after the first muslin.

I matched up the bodice front and back at the shoulder and made the back adjustments in the same location as the front adjustments to help keep things aligned. Here is the back:



Instead of making the adjustments this way, I could have repeatedly graded this pattern up to get it closer to my size. After looking through my grading books I decided that adding to the bodice width by splitting and spreading might be a shortcut. Time will tell.

I'm getting right to work on the first muslin!