My Evil Twin - AKA my Dress Form

When I started sewing more "seriously" - please try to contain your amusement - I decided to get a dress form to help with fitting. 

Dress form sizes are not analogous to clothing store sizes, so a 12-14 is much smaller than my actual body size. However, the dress forms that were closer to my size were more expensive and also I figured it was better to be smaller and then pad it out because I can always remove padding. Also, I'd basically have to pad my hips anyways since I'm a size or two smaller on top.

How to pad out a dress form:

I happened to have an unfinished sheath dress made out of a totally unsuitable fabric (imagine that) that I modified to be my skintight padding form. I believe the pattern was McCall's M6920 and if I remember correctly, the fabric was too flimsy for the shape of the dress and also there were some fitting issues -- the shoulders were set really far apart, etc.

Since the dress has princess seams, I just kept altering it smaller and smaller until it was basically skintight from my waist up and then I kept some ease in the hips so that it was tight when I bent over or squatted. My theory was that this would prevent me from fitting a garment to the dress form and then bending over for the first time and splitting it open like a banana.

You know how industries have evolved over thousands of years and the practitioners refine their best practices based on years of experience?

Maybe it should have occurred to me that I wasn't being innovative and ground breaking when I came up with this idea. If it was a GOOD idea, someone else would have done it long ago.

The main issue with this idea is that knits should fit close to the body and then they stretch when you move. So when I put a knit project on this dress form, it's waaaaay too tight in the hips, which kind of defeats the purpose. Even woven/non-stretch fabrics are a bit too tight on the hips/butt.

And, most disturbingly, every time I look at the dress form I have a moment of terror, like "DEAR LORD ARE MY HIPS AND BUTT REALLY THAT BIG? WHAT IS REALITY?"

But I digress.

I took some batting and wrapped it around the dress form, doubling it around the bust and tripling it in the hips. Then I shimmied the dress over the batting, trying to keep it all in position. Before zipping it up, I adjusted the batting so that it filled out the nooks and crannies of the dress.

As you can see from the pics, there's some sloppy fitting going on to take out all of the ease in the dress. Also, I flipped out the neck facing and pinned it to cover the chest of the dress form a bit more and used the arm hole facing to wrap around and contain the batting. There was also a bit too much ease in the back so I pinned it closed around the zipper.

To finish it off, I gathered the extra skirt length around the pole and secured it with a rubber band.

Maybe one day I'll alter the dress to be an accurate representation of my hips, but until then it works just fine to help with bodice fitting. It's also helpful when tissue fitting to at least get a rough idea of how much ease I'm going to have in the hips.

Just for giggles, I went on Amazon to see what a dress form in my size would cost. Seems like $300-$400, minimum. No way, Jose. I'm way too bad at sewing to spend that kind of money on wasting less money on failed projects.