Draping A Basic Design Bodice Block

After doing our closet purge, we realized Lily needs some new dresses. She’s outgrown kids sizes because they’re too short- waisted . She fits into the adult petite sizes now, but it’s hard to find modest dresses for a girl her age. Plus, i just feel like making a cute seersucker shirt dress for her! It will have style lines like this simple little number from Mod cloth. I’ll try to post about making the shirt dress pattern everyday this week, and hopefully be done by Friday.

Luckily she’s now almost the size of my smaller adult dress form. So I’m draping her a basic block. Once I’ve drafted the block, I’ll try it on her and do a final fitting. To see how I fit her sister using the flat pattern method, which is a lot more time consuming, you can check out this post.

First a draw two perpendicular lines to represent the straight grain and the cross grain of the fabric. These must remain straight while draping. If they fall off grain your design will be off grain. Not good. I pin along the center front, then smooth the fabric over. I pin into the shoulder and the side seam. Then I pin the darts which will naturally occur if the block is on grain. There will be a shoulder dart and a waist dart. I also clip along the waist and neckline to help the fabric lie flat.

I draw in the neckline, side seam, armholes, and shoulder, also marking the darts. Then I cut away the design with no seam allowance. Also, I mark the apex point.

I do the same for the back. aligning the crossgrain to the shoulder blade. The back darts will be longer then the front and there will be a small shoulder dart.

I take off the bodice piece, lie it on pattern paper, and make the darts extend to the apex. The darts need to go to the apex on a design block, so they can be manipulated and moved. This pattern is only for making other designs with and won’t have any seam allowances. I transfer all the markings to a paper and true the lines with my ruler.

I use a tracing wheel to transfer the dart markings. I put the paper on a cutting matt so I can trace the lines. Tonight I’ll do a fitting on Lily and then adjust the block to fit her. If you want to look at another post on drafting the basic, I have a slightly more detailed one here.