And here she is!

I'm still not entirely sure the stuffing is adequate, but I didn't think it a idea to keep redoing it indefinately. By the way, after cutting the taped dress off, I also put tape on the inside to stabilize it. I only closed it after that.

Mary is covered in grey-brown cotton jersey. I simply cut four pieces roughly to size (front and back bottom, front and back top), taped the first edges on and than overlapped the next piece, pinned it down and handstitched.

A little bit of 'plastic surgery' was needed at her breasts. The tape was rather wobbly there (probably from the t-shirt 'shrinking' back into shape after I took it off) so I put some small jersey scraps under the cover, to even out the offending bits.

What do you think? Does she look like me?

Stuffing Mary

Here she is! Yesterday E wrapped me in about two rolls of tape and, fortunately, cut me out of it again. I didn't take pictures of the process and I'm not goint to do a how-to because there are loads of those already. We used cheap fake gaffertape over a tight short dress. I made sure to tape over my shoulders and the very tops of my arms as well. Shoulders are very important for a good fit.

Today I closed the tape-and-dress construct up again and stuffed it with newpaper. I didn't want to press it down to hard at first, for fear of distorting the shape, however I soon realised that would allow the newspaper to shift later on, cause the collapse of curves. I actually had to open the bottom (closed with taped-on cardboard) and get half of the newspaper out twice, just to fix that. The problem is, you can only put pressure on the paper you can reach, it doesn't work well to try and compress all of it in the dummy.

I'm going to cover it in jersey later. I had the bottom half covered already but had to take it off to fix an indented hip. Oh well, a practice run. I had stretched the fabric a bit too much anyway.

New dress, now with more pictures

I've been too busy to pose in the shelf bust dress again, so instead I'm treating you to some more blurry-but-cute images of it, and a detail shot of the bodice as modeled by my not-so-faithful dressmaker's dummy.

Why do I talk down my dummy like that, you wonder? Well... I couldn't actually close this dress on her. Yep, her minimum bust circumference is still a bit bigger than mine and her breasts are not at the same height relative to the shoulder. I'm glad I bought her second hand, quite cheaply, because she mostly does service as a fancy clothes-hanger. I am planning on making an actual tape-body-double someday soon though. I've already enlisted E's cooperation, when I was complaining about how much easier it would be to envision techical workings of the bodice for this dress on a proper dummy.