Cutting & Making the Muslin Bodice

   Once the initial pattern has been made, I need to cut it out of muslin.  Muslin is just a cheep fabric that is easy to work with, which is a good color to show corrections on.  As you can see I've pinned the pattern to the fabric.  The fabric is doubled over - which allows me to cut two of each of the pieces in one go.  Two of the pieces are cut on the fold which makes one piece out of the two layers of fabric.  As you can see in the picture, I've drawn the seam allowance around each of the patterns in the amount of 1/2 inch on all sides, except the bottom, which has 2 inches (just in case it's too short).

  Once the pieces are cut out, I used a pounce wheel (see picture - it's the tiny spiky wheel) and transfer paper.  If you look carefully you can see the tracing marks on the fabric in the picture on the left. You place the paper folded in half between the two fabric pieces, and then run the pounce wheel over it.  This transfers little blue dot lines to the fabric.  I use this to mark both the seam edge and the edges of the darts.

Once I did this on all the pieces, I did a running stitch at the seam edge all the way around to make sure I could see where the marks were.  Then I pinned the darts, and stitched them.  The darts are done first - the you start at the top of the garment and do the seams.  I pinned and stitched the shoulders, then the sides of the bodice.  Next is the sides of the drop waist, and last I connected the drop waist and the bodice.  Once connected, I needed to do a fitting with Gina!  I've attached a few more pictures of it on the dress form from before the fitting.  See below.

The Front view

A close up of what the darts do.

The  back view