Monday 10 May 2010

7

SOS from Cool Girls' Headquarters

See that date, ladies? Only five more sleeps until the t-shirt portion of The Sew-Along is due. With that in mind, I pulled out my paper and book, drafted up my pattern and sewed up the muslin last night.


Obviously not hemmed or even neckline finished, but yeah. Tis a muslin. Everyone who had made a bash at this so far has been having some problems, mainly because the instructions say "Take a look at your armpits, and you'll see that they basically are right on the same horizontal line as your bust". Cue much gnashing and wailing that our collective bosoms fall far below our armpits. True story:


The other problem I had (and good thing I checked against an existing t-shirt pre-cutting) was that the original length would have made it a crop top and I am at lease a decade and a half past acceptable for that sort of thing. I did make a couple of changes to the instructions, most notably by dropping that neckline right down because t-shirts with high necks give me apoplexy. Here is an illustration of how my bust line is well below armpit:


See that? I cut the neckline right down to armpit height. If my bosoms did indeed sit at that line they would have been spilling right out and as you can see the t-shirt is still quite modest:


The by-product of drafting the width at armpit as my bust line means that when I lift my arms the armpit gravitates onto my arm (green line above is the actual seam line), whereas my true armhole should be the red line. This actually happens a lot to my store-bought shirts too so I guess it's at least consistent. The shoulder points are correct so I'm not sure how to fix it. Is it a question of rotating the armhole towards the centre and eliminating some of the superfluous width at the armpit?

7 comments:

  1. That extra fabric in your armpit is supposed to be down there where the girls are. Moving the armhole will just eliminate the ease that you need to move. That is, if you wanted to do that...

    FBA's aren't that hard...

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  2. Just do whatever KID, MD says since my muslin was so bad I didn't even sew it up. I pinned the pieces together and the fit was so terrible I didn't want to waste my time.

    I'm going to try again with a bigger armhole, but I'm not sure if drafting from the book is going to work for me. :(

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  3. I found that due to the baggyness on my second attempt, for the third attempt I deepend the curve so it was almost an inch a long the bust line before it curved...if that makes sense! :)

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  4. Having started with such hopes I don't think I'm going to be able to finish in time - I'm having a few stress related health issues right now - and also wish I'd read KID, MD's post about the drafting first too as I think it's going to look wonky on me.

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  5. I haven't even done the measurements, let alone made a muslin, so I think my membership of the cool girls club will have to be temporarily suspended.
    But I have just looked at my bosoms and they are definitely below my armpit line :(

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  6. I just found this great mini-tutorial for an FBA. Seriously, if you can draft a pattern, you CAN do this!!
    http://sewhavefun.blogspot.com/2010/01/full-bust-alteration-easy-peesy.html

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  7. oh dear, i hope i haven't distressed too many of you, cool girls! when i said that your 'armpit' should be [approximately] in line with your bust line, i was talking about the point where side seam, underarm seam of sleeve, and armhole seam all intersect, and referring to that intersection as the 'armpit'. so it's the armpit of the shirt, not exactly the armpit of your body. does that make sense?

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