Saturday, March 31, 2012

Dart Manipulation #1

Dart manipulation is the process of changing the position of the dart to create a different design. This can be done even on commercial patterns, that way even if you don't want to study patternmaking in detail, you can still create new designs from the patterns that you buy.
   This picture shows the basic locations of dart, starting from waist dart which was not labelled, next is French , then straight( perpendicular to center front) , then mid armhole,shoulder tip, mid shoulder, mid neck, center front neck, CF bust and CF waist dart.




        My Basic Barbie bodice has what was suppose to be a straight dart (though not that straight) so I need to make it into a waist dart because that is how the basic pattern is suppose to be according to the book I use.
Another thing is I have to figure out my bust point(apex of breast), unfortunately barbie doesn't have nipples, but am going to figure it out, though it got me thinking why I can't just use the dart point as a hinge if you know what I mean.
  This pic below will give you an idea


so this is how you manipulate dart, you slash a wedge and move it over to the other side while using the bust point as a hinge, i guess if i use the dart point then every dart will be radiating from a different point which i guess will distort the shape of the bodice. Both pictures above are from my patternmaking book.

Friday, March 30, 2012

Final sleeve pattern for now

So i didnt use the previous sleeve pattern again because i realized  the cap height is too long. I drafted a new sleeve free hand, with no specific instructions, but i made the cap flatter.
I increased the armhole ease of the bodice, so i made two sleeves and of course two bodice. Here is the result in pictures.




these are the sleeve patterns i used




These are the two bodice one on top of the other, you can see how i increased the armhole ease to the pattern piece below, of course the one above is the one from the previous post


this is the one with increased armhole ease, as you can see it didn't workout at all



This is the bodice from previous post, armhole  not altered, of course in the previous post i made the armhole deeper than the original bodice. 
The above was the more successful one though not perfect yet because there is bunching of fabric below the armpit, am not eager to fix that though as i have already said am going to start dart manipulation and maybe come back to the sleeve in the future, or may be just do the sleeve in human size coz this very difficult. I think that i can fix this by slightly increasing cap height. I am going to use my original bodice, the one in this post to do the dart manipulation. Am excited to start different designs from the dart manipulation, am using patternmaking for fashion design 5th edition by helen joseph-armstrong. I will talk about  dart manipulation in the next post.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Fixing armhole for sleeve

These are the pictures of the changes i made in my bodice to accommodate the sleeve, i will comment on the result in the next post. i have also realized that the sleeve doesn't have to be perfect before i can start working on my dart manipulation, i think i will soon start with dart manipulation.






Saturday, March 10, 2012

Draping a sleeve

    I started trying to drape a sleeve. There were a few things i thought i must fix in the bodice before draping a sleeve, i thought i must increase the size of the armhole to provide ease for the sleeve cap.

also i thought i need to lower the neckline and probably increase the shoulder seem


Well i didn't do any of  that, i just thought i should see what will happen if i just fit the sleeve without doing any of the above, and well it didn't turnout good.here are the pictures.

This is how the sleeve looks off, I know, it doesn't look right at all.

This is it with the arm slightly forward, it looks quiet normal but of course it's not


When I pull the arm back to its appropriate position on the side it pulls the bodice as you can see and creates this puckering
With the arm up it pulls the bodice completely up






This is it with the arm pulled back, it pulled the bodice back

when I bring the arm back to the front, it seams as if  everything is fine. 

  Well am going to fix all of that, and also i had a really difficult time draping the sleeve because i couldn't lift her arm, so i decided to buy a barbie fashionista (ball jointed barbie), my second try will definitely be on her.