Fitting shell vs. muslin vs. Neue Mode

I made one sleeve and put it on my muslin (which is not made of muslin at all — since I have a muslin shortage — but rather a weird fused fabric). It fit into the armhole quite well considering how unsuitable the fabric was, but I decided that I could stand to narrow the shoulder line by about 8mm and the upper chest about 2.2cm. So this might need to feed back into a future draft as a wider armhole diameter and narrower front width. As for the shoulder seam length, I'm not sure off the top of my head if Müller & Sohn have you use a shoulder line width measurement, or if they come up with it automatically from the back width (which is given more ease in their blouse draft example than in the base pattern).

Having considered all that, I had another look at Neue Mode 22957, which is what I'm now thinking of making next. Since it has puffed sleeve caps, I want a very neat fit in the shoulder width, so as not to build out the shoulder line even more. I decided to cut a 34 in the upper torso, blending into 38 under the arm. The 34 is somewhat shocking to me, but it seems to produce the right armhole depth and shoulder width, and combined with the 38 further down, makes it easy to get the sleeves wide enough (of course, the gathers help too). So apparently my torso might be quite cylindrical. Explains several things.

There are a couple of other alterations I've done, and I'm a little concerned about the shape of the back armhole in the Neue Mode (too much of a J rather than an L?) vs. my blouse draft, but I'm probably going to go ahead and cut in fabric soon. The combination of sizes also had the advantage that the 34's buttonholes are the only ones marked, and end up spaced just about right in spite of the reshaping.

WIPs

I've cut out the lining for the LWD/fitting shell dress. I used 2 yards 5" of silk crepe from stash. IIRC this was from the old Denver Fabrics. It's a very nice fabric, although I've been trying to avoid silk for the last few years, not being a big fan of any of the cleaning options for it.

On the old coat I'm relining, I got all the lining hems done. There are still a few more things to do. I'm noticing the underarms of the coat have been worked over a lot. If I still had any of the fabric I could've put in gussets to replace the worn areas.

I'm setting a new goal, too: for any project I finish, get rid of at least 1 item and ideally 2. I'm very much on track with this so far.

Dress-to-fitting-shell alterations (note to self)

Alterations I'd already done in the base pattern:

1. The back seam is meant to go in by 2cm at the waist, tapering to nothing up at the neckline, but continuing straight down from the waist to the hem. I let all of this out, i.e. I made a completely straight back seam.
2. The front waist dart is meant to continue down from the waist, so it continues to take skirt width out all the way to the hem. I changed it into a fisheye dart instead because it seemed I needed more room there in the hip circumference. I also reshaped this dart so its maximum intake was a bit above the waist.
3. I reshaped the hip curve, making it into more of an S-curve.

Alterations to the dress pattern (not design changes):

1. 1cm length-only FBA as shown in Müller.
2. Added 1cm at the CB hem, curving up to 0 at the side seam.

Alterations to the dress, after having cut and sewn:

1. Take in the back neck "darts" 1/4" (each leg), tapering this down to nothing quite a ways down the back (re-measure where exactly).
2. Take in the front neck "darts" 1/4", tapering to nothing at 1 3/4" below the finished edge (recheck this). Surprisingly, this seems to be needed to keep the front of the dress up, so that it doesn't collapse inward further down.
3. Let out 1/4" on each middle back-center back seam from the hem, up to the full hip mark, then tapering to nothing at the waist (recheck shaping).
4. Take in 1/4" on side seams from hem up to high hip.

I have not had to tighten up the armholes; it looks like raising the bottoms of them 1cm was enough, and they still sit flat to the figure.

What I expect to transfer back to the fitting shell:

1. Something accomplishing dress alteration #3. This could go in a side-back seam, or it could be pivoted in if flare at the hem is acceptable. For a fitting shell with a waist seam, there doesn't have to be any such compromise.
2. If #1, then also dress alteration #4.
3. Maybe the back length adjustment (dress pattern alteration #2). See how it goes with the hem.
4. Maybe not the FBA. Depends on what's worn under it. I'm not sure the extra length was really needed (see dress alteration #2).

LWD pattern

Now that I have a bit of a fitting shell, I'm going to test it in some sort of real fabric.

I'd been thinking about doing the Little White Dress contest on PatternReview, mainly as an excuse for/side effect of all this fitting shell drafting. I have more white and ivory fabrics in my stash than I want anyway, and very little actual muslin. So the thought was to test the fitting shell in one of those fabrics, and ideally have it turn out at least presentable enough to wear, if not to become one of my favorite things in my closet. Hopefully it'll use up just the right amount of a silk/linen blend I have in stash.

I got sidetracked briefly and considered using the fitting shell specs to alter Butterick 5894, which is one of the few very basic, sleeveless, fitted, straight dress patterns I currently have. But then I reminded myself that that wouldn't accomplish my goal of testing my fitting shell; I'd just end up with a white dress that I probably wouldn't have made otherwise. Big whoop.

So I decided to apply that double-princess-seam idea to my fitting shell instead. Here's my modified pattern:

By making one seam go into the neckline and the other into the armhole, I'll have places to tighten those up as necessary, as well as being able to tweak the waist and hip fit easily. Also, this avoids darts, which I've found were a real pain to press out on the very firmly woven silk/linen blend fabric I have in mind. At the same time, it's close enough to the original fitting shell pattern that I think I'll still get a decent idea of how that fits in at least one "real" fabric.

Fitting the fitting shell

I've copied off separate bodice and skirt pieces from the fitting shell. Before I go further, here's how I adjusted the fit after drafting.

• The basic pattern is supposed to have a very long front waist dart, from (below) the bust, to the greatest intake at the waist, curving to a smaller intake at the hip, then continuing straight down to the hem. The book says that this continuation can be reduced or left off if necessary. I just turned this into a normal, hip-length fisheye dart, and also reduced the intake. The smallest part is now actually above the marked waistline.
• I made the hip curves at the side seams much flatter, and they actually continue almost straight for 2-3cm below the waistline, so it's more of an S-curve than a normal hip curve. If I compare my new fitting shell to my old one, I used to think my waistline was about that much lower than I have it on this pattern. Maybe it was. Now, I have bone structure and "other structure" that is keeping my waist higher up. Before, maybe that bone structure was obscured and/or I had more "other structure" going on higher up. Or maybe I just placed the waist too low before — I could definitely see that happening with the way I worked with the fitting shell pattern at the time.
• I lengthened the centermost back waist darts by about 2cm at the bottom.
• I dropped the front neckline by a little over 1cm, and widened it slightly at the sides.
• When tracing off the separate skirt pieces, I slid in 1cm of width, half centered on each dart (increasing the dart intake to keep the waist size the same). I haven't yet tested the fit to decide whether this was a good idea or whether I'd have do something to the side seams as a result.

I'm considering doing a (probably length-only) FBA, too, or at least making a version of the bodice pattern that has one. My paper supply is getting low, though, so I might not want to go nuts with different variants right now.

Comparing this to my old fitting shell, it's surprising how much narrower it looks, especially in the bodice and the width across the armhole. I don't know how much of this is an ease difference vs. a size difference.

Progress on the fitting shell

I've finished the torso of the fitting shell, more or less.

It might've been better if I'd added some to the back hip area, as it might be pulling in a little in front. That would've required either creating a back princess seam, or creating a hinge and swinging the side seam out toward the hem, if one does it according to the instructions. I didn't really want to do the former on the dress fitting shell; as for the latter, I don't really want flare but I could see possibly avoiding this by using a second hinge to make the side seam straight again below the full hip. In any case, it'll be very straightforward to add width right where it's needed when I copy off a version with a waist seam.

It's interesting to me that the Müller system starts without a waist seam; all of the American fitting shells I've seen have waist seams and you are then told to stick the pieces together (with different tradeoffs for the different ways to do this) if you want a sheath dress. I'm going to have a look at my books later and see which option might best correspond to the inverse of this process.

Fitting shell type 1: Müller/Hofenbitzer

I could use a new set of fitting shells. Last time (2007) I started with a Butterick fitting shell pattern which, in the size I used at the time, probably started off too big in the upper torso, and I was never convinced that I'd got the armholes, shoulders, and upper back quite right. They are now just too big overall and probably don't fit my posture anymore either. Likewise, I drafted trousers using the Minott method, but they are also now too big, and I'm not sure I placed the waist at its real height in that draft.

So I've been looking through these. (I should mention, the Armstrong was in this stack just for completeness because it does very briefly mention taking measurements from a real human, but that isn't anywhere near being the focus of that book. The duct-taped book is a used copy of Jan Minott's Fitting Commercial Patterns.)

What I spend the big bucks on.

In theory I'd like to have drafts from several or all of them to compare to each other. Really, I might be obsessed enough to try it. But for now I'm working on the one in Müller & Sohn's Kleider und Blusen.

I almost started with Guido Hofenbitzer's Maßschnitte und Passform (new late last year) instead. Both of these books create similar styles of basic patterns (with no waist seam to start, unlike the usual American style). They cover certain figure/posture variations and how you can draft a basic pattern differently from the start to address them.

M&P seems less densely written; for one thing, I think it tends to use less of the sentence-structure variation that can make German harder for a non-native speaker (such as myself) to read. It also covers trousers in the same volume, as well as a bigger selection of possible figure variations. This is where I ran into trouble: you have to compare your balance of front and back measurements to an ideal. Then, by using these comparisons and observing the person being measured, you decide what variations (or combinations thereof) are causing the differences from the ideal, and by what amounts different areas will need to be adjusted. I played around with these calculations for quite a while, but eventually felt like I was wandering off into the weeds; in any case, I didn't think I should necessarily trust my measurement set that far in the first place. So I decided to go back to K&B, just get a first draft done and see how well it worked. I hope to come back to M&P later and maybe at least reverse-engineer how my fit issues would have been classified.