Having a dress form or tailors’ dummy can make making your own clothes so much easier. It’s very difficult pinning things to your back and then drawing on yourself with a pen! It’s equally difficult trying to pin a hem and check that it’s straight.
They’re not so useful if they are not the same size as you! This is when you might need to alter a dress form.
The best kind of tailors’ dummy is the adjustable sort
As have I.
My dress form, known as Betty, has never been a great match size wise and this has resulted in some slightly peculiar results.
Living in quite a small house as we do, there is no room for large items of clutter, which Betty has unfortunately become.
So there’s a choice:
Get rid of Betty (I feel bad doing this as she was a Christmas present a few years ago).
Get a new one (I already have one and there’s not space for 2, which takes me back to #1)
Fix Betty up so that clothes that fit her also fit me.
I decided to go for option #3. If it worked, I’d have a dress form that was the right size. If it not, I’d still have options 1 and 2.
Thankfully it did work, although she does still need a little bit of adjusting.
How to Alter a Dress Form
The first thing to do is take some measurements.
The measurements I took were:
Round my neck
The distance between my shoulders
Shoulders to armpit
Round my top area under the armpits
Boob area
Under boob area
Waist
Hips
Distance from waist to hips
Distance from armpit to waist
I then took Betty’s measurements.
Her top half needed to be slimmed down a bit. The rest of it was fine, although the fact that she is not squashy is still a slight problem.
How to Make a Dress Form Smaller
The cheaper dress forms are usually made of polystyrene and covered with a nylon cover. So remove the cover and find a sharp, serrated knife.
As polystyrene makes an almighty mess, I’d recommend putting a tablecloth or a sheet down first. When I did this, it got everywhere. It even stuck to the cat.
Identify the areas on the mannequin where your measurements are different. Using the knife, carefully shave bits of the dress form until the measurements correspond with your own.
Keep measuring!
When you have got those areas to the correct size, then you can grade it between those points so that the dress form’s curves are similar to your own.
Having a smaller frame than the dress form, I cut quite a bit of the underarm area and also off the back.
Obviously cutting bits of it off only works if the dress form is too big. So what do you do if it’s too small (or if you accidently cut too much off)?
How to Make a Dress Form Bigger
In order to make your dress form bigger, you will need some firm batting or wadding, an old bra and an old top, either a snug fitting t shirt or a vest top. The kind they sell in Primark is just the thing.
Identify the areas that need padding out. Start to layer up the wadding and pin it in place. Pop the t shirt onto the dress form and check the measurements. Keep going like this until you have a dress form that fits!
There’s a nice tutorial showing how to do this in more detail at Sew Country Chick.
PS If you want to sew clothes without using a pattern, you might like my ebook!
You might like to read these posts:
Cherry Blossom Dress Without a Pattern
Cross Over Style Jersey Dress Without a Pattern
25 Tips For Sewing Clothes Without a Pattern
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I have spent months working on fitting a moulage/sloper/exact copy of my body to stuff for my dress form. I finally got the bottom ready to stuff. I got it all stuffed and realized I had the butt under the the bust of the original dress form. I spent a day fixing that and measured the final result. It is 5″ bigger around than me. Even though when i had the cover on me it fit tight. I guess I’ll drape a pencil skirt on it and see where it needs to be taken in. I hope the top goes better. Maybe I was lucky enough to loose weight between when I made the sloper and finished stuffing it.
If it took a long time, you might have lost some weight. Dress forms are really useful, but in the end you have to try it on yourself anyway. Hope you get it to a point where you can use it.
Anna! Brilliant! Thank you so much for that idea! I ordered a dressform that I thought would work with a little help from the Fabulous Fit padding system. But Marjory’s (anyone remember Fry & Laurie?) bust was way too high on her chest! I finally grabbed a bread knife and SLICED, I mean I gave the poor gal a double mastectomy and narrowed her shoulders, too. With the padding kit, I was able to give her new breasts, a tummy, even my crooked back (I have minor scoliosis, which makes fitting complicated). She looks just like me!
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Brilliant! So pleased you found it helpful xx
And thanks for visiting my blog, Anna. I used the wrong email address for my comment, so couldn’t subscribe to yours. Will now try to change that. I’m a screaming sewist and need all the help I can get.
Faith recently posted…The Reveal…
I love American houses! Looking forward to seeing what you do with it 🙂
Dear Anna,
What a relief to stumble on your website, inparticular how to remodel a polystyrene dress form. I’ve been searching for years for the right solution to all my dress redesignings/ makings, and having tried adjustable dummies – even they dont work (i’m size 8 but with v small waist and bigger bum re those proportions,) – Having given up on being hologrammed and 3D printed(!) I’m convinced carving styrofome was my own is the solution. ?Then I found your site. but I need to source a size 10 or even 12 polystyrene dummy, in order to cut it down to right proportions (quite handy with a knife and dont care how long it takes ) , and I can’t find one. I live in London and will travel anywhere within M25 to buy one. Do you have any ideas? thanks Sally , PS: love your ‘christimas tree stand’ solution too; you’re a woman after my own heart.
Sorry it’s taken me so long, life here has descended into chaos again! I asked my mum and she got it from Amazon. If you prefer not to use Amazon, it might be worth ringing round some sewing shops to see if they have one, or if they could get one in for you. Being hologrammed sounds expensive, but there might be another alternative. A lady form All Free Sewing wrote me a post about making a dress form using duct tape. It’s here: https://www.awilson.co.uk/how-to-make-a-diy-body-form/ Good luck!
Great idea and very useful to know too.
Thank you. I like having one that’s the right size now!
I have never seen a polystyrene dress from before. If I had I would have grabbed them in a moment. The cheap ones here are those flimsy plastic things that seem to have been made out of old soda bottles.
I’ve never seen one of those! I’ve no idea how you’d go about making one smaller!
I could not manage without my dressform, love it
Once you have one, you don’t really want to go back to managing without!