First Attempt At “Mummified” Me (Padding The Dress Form)

As promised I took some pictures. (Not good ones, but visuals are visuals right?) I don’t have the padding right yet. I’m trying to add my fat, rounded upper back and sway back. Yeah, ageing hasn’t been good to me. It hit me kinda hard once I started trying to make my body shape on the dress form. I let myself fall apart a bit too much. I can’t get the stomach and behind shaped correctly yet…. I also need to fine tune my bust apex area and figure out a way to shape the upper back without interfering with the collapsible shoulder feature of the dress form.

Like many others before me have said, and many after me will say:

“My dress form has much perkier breasts then I do.”

I guess my breasts decided since I was over the hill they were going to start trying to race me down the other side of said hill….

My first attempt at padding. I haven’t gotten the shape right.

As you can see though that Mountain Mist Cream Rose batting is amazing stuff. I cut (hacked off) randomly sized strips roughly 5-9 cm. Opened the strips up and folded them back and forth in the areas I am bigger in then the form is. I then wrapped one strip over the folded stuff to better secure it. This batting is only 1/8th of an inch thick (I think?) And if you stretch the strips they get even thinner. This works to smooth out places where you have a bunch of pieces folded underneath.

So far that’s almost an entire queen sized sheet of this batting but I have about 2 feet of the roll left to use yet from the first bag of it. I haven’t touched the second bag yet. I need to take all this off and redo it I think until me in the mirror, and the padded form, match better…. The form is size 12 which was the closest size without going over on some measurements but the areas I need to tweak are larger then the form by several inches.

Above is the front sheath and back bodice muslin of the walkaway dress with the additional pieces I had to cut. I pinned them to the pattern piece they went to so I wouldn’t loose them before I got back to the Walkaway Dress. You can kind-of see on the pattern where the material JUST didn’t make it to…

I think I made the pieces correctly? I added a 5/8th seam allowance to them. I’ll see when I sew them together. I made notes on the pattern so I would hopefully know what I meant to do when it came time to doing it…  I didn’t want to cut into the original pattern so I just traced the bits on more tracing cloth. After I’m done with the pattern I can fold everything and put all the pattern pieces in a sandwich baggie so everything’s together when I use the pattern again. Other then those two pieced parts the skirt does fit on the 36″ wide fabric. You just need more fabric because of that sheath dress strip and the circle skirt layout doesn’t work like the pattern packet layout says it does on 45″ or 60″ fabric. Live and learn.

This long strip will be completely hidden behind the back bodice since it wraps around. I sadly didn’t cut the circle skirt yet. I will need to do that as soon as I can.

I figured I would throw this in too. As people in computer games say: “Pictures or it didn’t happen!” The finished thin knit nightmare wrap dress did indeed happen.

As you can see the knit sticks to the batting almost as well as the batting sticks to itself. It doesn’t hang like this on a real body. The knit drapes really well and it doesn’t poof on the waist. Honestly, I just threw it on the form and snapped the picture with VERY minimal fuss. The neck facing got tucked in as best I could since it needs ironing… badly…

Wish me luck re-doing the padding! Too tired to proof read this very well so I’m sorry if I’m writing REALLY badly. Take care for now everyone!