DD - 42
While I was working on the belt and shoulder pieces, I was also working on my plan for the dress.
The fabric we had chosen wasn't reorderable. So I only had the one piece to work with, which after pre-shrinking was about 57 inches wide and about 6.5 yards long. And out of that I wanted to make the dress as full as possible. Thankfully, after measuring and calculating very carefully I was able to come up with a design that made maximum use of the yardage.
The body of the dress was assembled from 6 panels: left and right front, left and right sides, and left and right back. Each panel was basically half the width of the yardage. Two final half-width panels form the sleeves. As each panel was about 27 inches wide, that gave a total circumference of about 162 inches. Compared to Con-Buddy's 48 inch bust, that gave me a gathering ratio of 3.375 at the bust, and even more at the waist - nice and full.
The drawing on the left shows the dress without the sleeve, so you can see how I designed the fullness on the side panels to be pleated into the armscye. While the fullness on the front and back panels gathered into the shoulder pieces, like in the inspiration dress. The drawing on the right shows one of the sleeves, which are basically just long rectangles, sewn into tubes only at the tops of the sleeves.
DD - 42
While I was working on the belt and shoulder pieces, I was also working on my plan for the dress.
The fabric we had chosen wasn't reorderable. So I only had the one piece to work with, which after pre-shrinking was about 57 inches wide and about 6.5 yards long. And out of that I wanted to make the dress as full as possible. Thankfully, after measuring and calculating very carefully I was able to come up with a design that made maximum use of the yardage.
The body of the dress was assembled from 6 panels: left and right front, left and right sides, and left and right back. Each panel was basically half the width of the yardage. Two final half-width panels form the sleeves. As each panel was about 27 inches wide, that gave a total circumference of about 162 inches. Compared to Con-Buddy's 48 inch bust, that gave me a gathering ratio of 3.375 at the bust, and even more at the waist - nice and full.
The drawing on the left shows the dress without the sleeve, so you can see how I designed the fullness on the side panels to be pleated into the armscye. While the fullness on the front and back panels gathered into the shoulder pieces, like in the inspiration dress. The drawing on the right shows one of the sleeves, which are basically just long rectangles, sewn into tubes only at the tops of the sleeves.