The Wedding Dress - Progress on Muslin

Over the last couple of days, there has been some progress on the wedding dress. I spent some time cutting apart the necessary pattern pieces for the draping (Vogue 8150) and the skirt (McCall 6701). I then ironed each piece with a cool iron, marked the stitching line and lengthened the grain line. The tough part is trying to figure out where to finish the top of the skirt since the dress is made with full length panels from bust to floor (see photo above). Considering that I am taking parts of this dress from Butterick, McCall and Vogue, I should be calling this the Wedding Dress of Frankenstein.

I have been keeping track of the number of yards of muslin that I have used. This will give me a good idea of how many yards of fashion fabric that I will need to buy. I cannot rely on the package estimates because I am only using parts of each pattern. There will be a lot of yards of fabric.

Today, Monica arrived. Who's Monica you ask? Why it is Monica Mannequin our new family member. Do you think that it is weird to name your dress form? Yeah , I know --weird.

But she was quick to set up and not too hard to get into the correct measurements. However, every body is different and I had to pad out some areas to get them to the right shape, so I took some quilt batting and padded out Monica's figure to match DD's.

In order to keep the batting on, I took an old T-shirt, cut off the sleeves. Then I used my new serger to serge up the sleeve holes and take in the waist. Now it fits Monica like a glove and keeps the padding where it is needed.


Here you can see that Monica now has a nice round feminine shape instead a flat-as-a-board stomach. I may have to adjust this a little when the real DD comes up for her fitting in November, but this will give me approximates. Now that Monica has arrived, it will be easier to see how the pieces that I construct will look on a human. It is hard to see how it looks on me and my husband refuses no matter how much he loves me. Monica and I have some work to do -- we will blog our progress later!

Happy sewing!