Bombshell - another muslin??

Well, if I’m going to put this much work into something, it better FIT right!  I’m still not sure that it will, but I think I have now made 2 more muslins on this thing.  After my last post, I still was not happy with the fit yet.  I decided to take my muslin pieces and see which size they most closely matched and go from there.

I ended up using the largest size cups on the pattern which was a 44.  Then, I had to figure out how to make those cups fit into the size 36 bodice.  I don’t know if I did it the “right” way, but I hope that what I did works.  I lowered the cup curve on the bodice and also added some to the cup.  I tried this on, and was still not happy.  The center front would not go in close to my body.  Not sure what to do at this point, and not having a fitting partner, I had to get creative.  I kept looking at the bra I was wearing and thought, “OK, this bra touches my body in the center, why doesn’t this muslin?” I decided to take a molded cup bra that has only been worn a couple of times and fits me perfectly and use that for my “model”.  I used the two bottom cup pieces from the pattern and pinned them onto the bra.  I then smoothed the upper piece along the top, pinning as I went.  I used a pencil to mark where I needed the top and bottom to meet so that there would be no pleating or puckering.  I’m hoping this will work!!  I really won’t know until all the layers of the dress and boning are put together.  The only unfortunate thing is that I think I may have lost some of the design lines to the cups that have the little corners.  Oh well, it will be worth it if it fits correctly.  That was Thursday.

Here is a picture of the muslin being shaped over the bra.

These are the changes that I made to the cups after marking them and taking them off of the bra.

Last night I traced all of those pieces with the changes onto muslin again.  This time the pieces will be used as the underlining.  I did prewash the muslin because it does shrink.  If I’m doing a lot of pressing, I do not want the underlining to shrink.  Because of all the layers (fashion fabric, underlining, lining) and boning in this dress, I think I will make sure to only dry clean this one.  I have only used ridgelene boning in the past, but plan on ordering spiral steel boning for this one.

This morning (Friday) I pinned all of the muslin pieces onto the fashion fabric.  I cut around these pieces and started basting the two layers together, following the seamlines.  All of this basting will be removed later, so I used silk thread for the basting.  Because of the print of the dress, I tried 3 different colors of thread before I found one that showed up well.  I finally ended up using an off-white.  I wasn’t going to use this at first because it won’t show up on the muslin.  Well, that doesn’t matter because I can see the tracing on that side!

Tomorrow I would like to finish the hand basting and start putting it together.  The basting is actually going pretty fast and is easy to do while I’m sitting in the family room watching DVR of Project Runway season 10!  Thank goodness for DVR, I hadn’t realized that the new season had already started.