Phyllis and I spent the day working on some projects. She’s working on the muslin for a shirt. I made great progress, with her help, on the Dress Form Double. We padded out my form, and most of it is done. Phyllis already talked about this on her blog, but it bears repeating: this project is a two-person, 30-to-40 hour project.
Here’s the general order of construction when you get to the padding stage:
- Measure at 2-inch intervals, using the caliper method described in Kenneth King’s article.
- Apply fusible batting, using silk organza* as a press cloth
- Put outer shell over the dress form and check padding
- Repeat, ad nauseum
*You need a lot of organza. It gets gummed up with the resin from the batting after a few passes with the iron. We went through at least a yard. And poly organza won’t cut it. You really need silk.
We spent our time on the upper chest and bust, since that is the most complex part to build out. I took some pictures but something happened with my phone and it didn’t save them. Boo, hiss. Here are the three I did manage to save. I’ll ask Phyllis to send me the others and I’ll post them later.
Padding the bust. It really helps to baste the padding down to the CF.
Padding the upper back
Testing the padding against the outer shell – it needs more padding.
We added more padding, and what you can’t see here is that we used raglan shoulder pads to create the “breasts”. We covered those with fusible batting. We had to do some creative padding to match the – um – vagaries of my particular figure. But by the end of the day, we had a pretty close approximation. I’ll spend tomorrow padding out the rest of the waist (sigh…) and the hips. More later…
Happy sewing!
Looking great, I’m impressed with your patience and persistence!
Ann I’ll email you those pix as soon as I finish my comment. And I think I’ll open up my version and add the “specialty” padding on mine well,
I really like that result.
Thank you for these posts. I’ve read about this on the web and always sensed that this was a much more detailed process than was acknowledged. I now understand why someone quoted me a price of $500 to pad a dress form. I see it’s reasonable.
I’ve been torn between trying this method and saving up for a custom form.
I think $500 is reasonable price for a custom dress form given the mount of work that goes into a project this. Kenneth King’s method is also a two person project and if you don’t have a sewing friend to help with fitting the shell and padding out the double a custom form is absolutely the way to go.
I don’t recall the Kenneth King article. Which issue of Threads was it in? I have a long torso , short arms and am shaped like a pear on steroids so standard dress form don’t work for me. Thanks!
I made my body double using the mytwindressforms.com method. I made a plaster mold and filled it with polyurethane foam. So thrilled with the results. http://sewnotwork.wordpress.com/
Yours is looking great!!
As for supplies, total cost $100. But it was a process that took several hours spread over weeks because I had to do it in my spare time.