Dressing Glinda - First steps in designing the bodice

With Glinda ready for action, and about ten yards of cheap cotton from Jo-Ann's (soon to be my most-frequented store, surpassing Lowes that had sucked us in as new homeowners a year prior), I was ready to begin draping!

The plain cotton was the cheapest way to experiment with pattern design, and for practice dresses, known as muslins.

I ended up being able to use that amount of cotton for design processes, a full-length practice dress that later became a sewing-table cover when I worked with fancier fabrics, and also some of it got used in the preservation of the dress!

 I pinched and pinned and laid the fabric over Glinda's chest, working to make symmetry out of a formless piece of fabric.  After plenty of re-working, I had it looking like sort of the almost front part of what would hopefully be the bodice I imagined.  I drew on the basic cotton where the neckline would be and tacked (loosely hand-sewed) along that line, and along the waistband area.  Then I snipped off the excess fabric that had been obscuring my view of Glinda and how this thing really looked on her.  I marked where the pleats were, and crossed my fingers that I'd be able to match them back up once I unfolded the fabric!  Then I unfolded it!  It created essentially a pattern for the front piece of the bodice.  It was just a matter of reversing the process using a new piece of fabric.  Simple, right?  We'll see.  Before going into that, I used tracing paper to transfer the shape and pleat marks onto newsprint to serve as a pattern for future work and alterations I might make.

The pattern I used for the bodice liner.
You can see the dress in the photo below
behind Glinda, from when I tried it on her.

There was also behind-the-scenes work at this stage.  The fancy pleated bodice I was designing needed a lining to support it and protect it on the inside while being worn.  I began making that with the lining pattern from a dress that I liked, which had about the right neckline and waist height.  I gave it a couple alterations to make it more generic looking and help the back dip down into the "V" I wanted, and tried it on Glinda.

It turns out I'm built crooked (one hip is distinctly bonier on Glinda, and I realized that's because it's bonier on me, and one shoulder is higher).  I had to do some alterations to get it to fit very smoothly across Glinda's torso and to get the side seams to lay in the right spot.  This kind of detail is part of what makes for good quality "couture" sewing.  Ideally, at some point I'll make what's called a sloper, which is a very basic pattern that is perfectly tailored to the person it's for.  I was making a lazy sewist's sloper in a way, just covering enough of the mannequin to manage this one project.  One of the uses of this liner pattern would prove to be quite the challenge later, as it turned out.

The bodice pattern wasn't quite a right fit for me (the original dress wasn't either unfortunately...), so I used tailoring techniques like pinch-and-pin to get a right fit, essentially making my own pattern based on the original.
You can see the tape on Glinda showing where I was thinking about putting removable straps.
I decided they didn't look good and weren't worth the work.

When I had the first "draft" on Glinda, I pinned it into a better fit and marked where seams should ideally be (since in this process they get moved).  I then sewed along the pinned lines, then recut it apart along the "new" seamlines I'd drawn so I could trace the new altered pieces onto paper (adding 1/4" for seam allowance).  Then use that new pattern to cut new fabric, re-sew, re-try-it-on, and hopefully get a perfect fit at that point!  It took a few tries and happened over the course of at least a day or two.

To add seam allowance when I re-made pattern pieces,
I used my sewing gauge and made notches around the outside,
connecting the dots with my fancy new clear quilting ruler.
To cut them out cleanly, I used my new half-off rotary blade and that ruler.

In this photo, you can also see the marks foreshadowing the difficulties I would later have
with getting the lining to transition from the fashion (outer) fabric along the top edge of the inner bodice,
where it might be partially visible, to the lining fabric that would line the rest of the gown.

You can also see the special silk pins with glass heads I bought to prevent melting under the
iron and snags in fancy fabric.  They were very narrow and bendy, so I lost a few along the way, but most survived.