Alterations on S2498

Well, even if I'm not sewing the dress until Christmas break, I did do some alterations on my bodice muslin a few weekends ago. I have never understood how people who haven't other people to help them fit manage to fit anything. (On the other hand, I am so asymmetrical that a dressmaker's dummy just can't cut it. Perhaps if I were regularly shaped, or at least symmetrical, I could fit my own clothes.) Anyway, this was an interesting fitting, since the person who was helping me, my sister Teresa, doesn't really sew very much. So she had less practice at knowing how to fix various problems. It worked quite well, though. I made a good deal of alterations:

This picture is not the greatest, and I apologize for that. The first thing I (or rather, we) did was to shorten the shoulder straps of the bodice. (For the record, I'm going with the terms bodice and bodice overlay. Hopefully that isn't too confusing.) They were a good two or three inches too long--I'm not sure if that's a pattern error or what.

I also took in the shoulder seams. Because of the way my shoulders are shaped, the arm hole is the right size, but the neck is too big. So we tapered the shoulder seam on both sides. You can see the new line of the shoulder--it's right where the line of safety pins is:

The third alteration was to fix the fact that the front neck edge of the bodice gapped. Again, we tapered. I'll just move this piece when I cut it out for real, since it's cut on the fold:
The last two alterations I did I haven't got pictures of, although you can see one of them in the first picture. I took in the underarm seam on the right side of the bodice overlay. It makes me extremely nervous that I only had to take it in on one side, because I don't think I'm that asymmetrical. However, there will most certainly be another fitting over Christmas break, so I'm not terribly fussed. The other alteration I did was to add 5/8" to each side of the center back seam. It certainly seems counter intuitive to be taking width out of the front and adding width in the back, but since my shoulders are somewhat rounded, that really did have to happen. Of course, since that changes the width of the waist seam too, I will have to alter the skirt pieces a bit, but that shouldn't take more than about 30 seconds.

I'm hoping that I will stay close enough to the shape I am now that I won't really have to re-alter these pattern pieces come Christmastime. We shall see. Wish me luck!