Checking Fit
Now, the humans in the audience will have a little more trouble here. In a perfect world, you’re pouring over these directions with a helper. However, we costumers are generally solitary souls, so you might well be doing this yourself. Be prepared to take the block on and off several times. If you’re relatively flexible, you should be able to reach behind yourself and, with the help of a mirror, mark your waist. You could also raid someone’s tool chest for a chalk line and run it around your waist – messy, but it will get you to the right place. You could use a long strip of masking tape at waist level. (Did I mention my hatred of tape? So ick.) I used to use a sort of “press test” – press your fingers into the bodice behind you, moving slowly upward from the bottom of the block. There will be a point where pressing on the block releases the pressure against your back at the bottom of the block below where your fingers are, but makes other parts of the bottom feel slightly more snug. This is the point where your back dips in, and where your bodice should sit in back. Depending on my weight, I find that this point is often above where the front of my body believes my waist is. Make little cuts up to this level (lower towards the sides, as seen above). Ideally, you should take the block off for this, and using a scissors on your own back is a Bad Idea.
Next … Adjusting the Straps!
The links to pages 2-5 seem to be broken … they all lead back to the start of page 1. (Same for the Part 1 entry).
:(
Hey, wow, that’s a good point – *all* of my paginated posts are broken. I’m looking into it now.
Aaaaalllllright, then. Fixed. That took entirely too long.
< civic geekery >
Note to the collective human knowledgebase known as the web: After upgrading to WordPress 3.0, my permalink structure (/%category%/%postname%/) with my marvelously nested category structure became too much for the wordpress/mod_rewrite engine to handle. Links within paginated posts automatically redirected to the post permalink, and all page information was stubbornly dropped from the link. On the advice of a terribly clever fellow at http://www.weberz.com/blog/2009/06/seo-experts-give-wrong-advice-wordpress-permalinks , I changed my permalink structure to /%year%/%postname%/ – still readable, faster, and most importantly, it fixes the problem.
</civic geekery>
[…] You might also like:The Basic Conical Torso Block (Part 2) […]
Where do you get such big poster board to do this for human-size? I got the standard size they sell for 99 cents at the pharmacy, and I’m a pretty tiny person, and I can’t do that with the center line. I’m going to be cutting two pieces and taping them together.
You can find larger poster board than that at most art stores – (including Hobby Lobby, Blick, Michaels, etc) and any place that caters to students (walgreens, target, kmart, walmart-even-thought-I’m-still-boycotting), and often also at JoAnn’s.
Hope that helps….
THANK YOU so much for sharing your knowledge with us. <3
And thank you for reading and commenting! :)
Hello! I have no idea if you’re still active but if you are, do you have any tips on how to turn this block into a waistcoat pattern?
The specifics depend a lot on the era that the waistcoat is for. In general, though, you’re going to be putting the center front, side front, and possibly side-back pieces together into one panel for the fronts. The center back (or center and side back, if side back was not added to the front panel) will become the back panel. Shaping generally moves to the center front seam, and possibly to the side-back seam.
That’s actually a really good question. I’ll see if I can get some time to play around with this. :)
Thank you for such a great tutorial. I’m eager to try this out.
Just discovered and made the block and Wench bodice! It worked really well ,thank you for posting!