Let's Make The Pattern of This Red Dress with Your Own Bodice Pattern

This is the dress I sewed for my daughter.  Of course, this someone's pin she found on Pinterest.  I made the top part with princess dress cut.  Since this maybe your first time using bodice pattern, I will keep it simple using darts to shape the top part of the dress.  The skirt is only a half circle; that can be easily done.

Let's get started.  Get your bodice pattern out.  I will demonstrate with Size S measurement.

1. Trace your bodice pattern on the paper.  Add bust line, waist line, and BP.  
   
2.  Measure your waist (68.5 cm for size S).  Figure out the difference between your pattern and 1/2 of your waist. The pattern only show half of your body  So we need to divide 68.5 by 2, which is 34.3. The waist of size s pattern is 49.5.    The difference will be 49.5 - 34.3 = 15.2.  We need to trim off  about or less of 15.2 cm on the pattern.
   
3.  Measure your bust (89 cm for size S). Follow step 2 to get the difference between the pattern and actual measurement.  You will get 49.5 - 44.5 = 5 for size S.
   
4.  With the calculations on step 2 and 3, we can start to construct our dress pattern.  We will start at the front neck.  The neck line of the pattern is right at the bottom of the neck.  You can decide how big the neck line of your dress you want to be.  I drop  7 cm from the neck down and 5 cm on the shoulder.
   
5.  Now the armhole, this dress is a snuggle fit, but I don't want to feel so tight that I can't breathe;  I took 1 cm in on the bust line instead of 2.5 (half of the number from step 3).
   
6.   In step 2, we figured we need to shrink the waist by about 15.2.  With the principle of being able to breathe easily, I allowed 1.5 bigger on each side.  So we will take off 12.2 cm  from the pattern.  We will draw a line from the armhole from step 5 to meet the waist line (ignore the slope, we will adjust that later).   Picture above.
7.  Mark 2 cm from the line we just drew from step 6 on waist line.
   
8.  Draw a line down from BP to waist line.  Then measure 11 cm from the waist line to form a triangle with 3 cm on the bottom as shown on the picture.  This will be a dart.  Now we complete the front side( the black line). Picture above.
9. We will start the back side from the neck line and shoulder.  I will drop 2 cm from the neck line, and the shoulder will be the same with the front piece, starting 1 cm up from the end of the shoulder.
   
10. For the armhole of the back piece, I take in 1 cm on the bust line, then adjust the armhole. 
    
    
    
11. Now we come to the waist line.  The back piece is a little bit different  from the front one.  We need to take in 1 cm at the middle of the back and connect with the dot at the middle of neck line and breast line.  From here we will measure 9 cm , then form a triangle with 10 cm height and 3 cm on the bottom as shown on the picture.  The last thing is taking in 2 cm from the side of the pattern.  Then, we complete the back piece of the dress.
    
     
12. Now, we go back to front piece to draw the last dart.  It is a dart on the side.   3 cm down from the armhole, draw a triangle with height of 12 cm.  The bottom of the triangle is the difference of front and back.
    
    
    

Sleeves

1. Draw a cross.  The top of the cross is 15 cm.
   
2. We need to form a triangle.  The right side of the triangle is the length of front armhole of your pattern, which is 19 on mine.
   

3.  The left side of the triangle is the back armhole, which is 20.6 cm on mine.

4.  Divide the right side of the triangle into 4 sections.

5.  Form a curve up on the fist half with 1 cm up from the line. Do the same with the second half, except it curves down.

6.  The top curve of the left side is exactly the same as the right side, but the second half extends to 1/3 of the whole length.  The remaining 1/3 of the length will form a smaller curve with the height of 0.5 cm.

7.  Decide the length and width of your sleeves.  My is 27 and 26.  Then, you finish the sleeves.

Skirt- a half circle skirt.

1.  We need to find the radius of the small quarter circle.  Here is the formula. 

 Waist length of your pattern x 2 / 3.14 .  Mine comes out to be 22.  With the radius of 22, we will draw a quarter circle.

2.  With the skirt length you want to draw a bigger quarter circle.   Cut off the small quarter circle.  Now you have your skirt pattern.

That concludes the pattern making for the red dress.  When you cut up the materials, don't forget to leave sewing seams, and to cut out extra pieces for the lining around the neck line.  

Happy Sewing!!

Bodice Pattern

With the basic bodice pattern, you can make and design any shirt or dress that will fit you perfectly.  I am going to introduce you to the Japanese Bunka style bodice pattern and show you how to use it.

1.  Get the measurement of your bust (measurement 1 in the front and picture), back length (measurement 6 in the back picture).

2.  Draw a rectangle with measurement of your back length and half of your bust plus 5 cm (1/2 b +5).  I use centimeter in all my measurement.

3. Follow the instructions on the picture to separate the big rectangle into 2 halves than to smaller rectangles.(B=bust measurement)

 Draw another line to form 4 rectangles at the middle.

The distance between the middle of Back or Chest to armhole.

4.  Create back neck line.  Let's call the the number of 1/20b=2.9 ---N. We are going to use this number through the whole project.

5.  Next thing we will do the shoulder.

6.  In this step we will draw armhole.  The distance between the middle line and the line on the left we will name it A. The curve intercepts the line between shoulder and and armhole at 2.5 cm below the center.

7,  Let's finish the back piece with line on the side.

This is the back piece should look like.

8.  Now the neck line of front piece.  Remember the measurement of N from the back piece?  Use the number we get from N-0.2 (we now name this number F) and N+1 to create a rectangle, then the curve.

9.  Front shoulder, back piece - 1.8 cm

Draw the front armhole the same way as back piece.

10.  Now the breast part.  BP is the tip of the breast.  The BP line is drawn 0.7 cm left of middle point of B1 and B2 and 4 cm down.

11.  Since our fronts are not flat.  We need to make it longer to make more room.  It is 1/2 F longer (remember F we used to make neckline).  Draw the bottom line, then, finish the front piece. 

I will show you how to use the patterns to make a dress pattern.