When I took up sewing again, I wanted a dress form to help me with fitting and hemming garments for myself. So I went looking....bear in mind I live in Australia and choices are be limited.
The easiest ones to find here are the Singer adjustable types (or similar) which I'm sure would have been fine but it just looked and felt like plastic. Also they are not inexpensive, so I didn't really want to buy it just because it was a readily available option.
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| Singer Adjustable Dress Form |
Moving on, I read alot about making a duct tape dress forms like
this one. The big advantages are that it's cheap to make and will end up much closer to your body shape than the one above. But you'd have to make it, fill it and mount it, etc, etc and I don't really have the patience for this. They seem pretty popular.
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| Making duct tape dress form - Threads Magazine |
There's versions like these from
Fabulous Fit which allows you to pad out a standard form to better match your shape. I like the idea this option because if you loose or gain weight you can alter the standard form by removing or adding padding (within the limitations of the standard shape of course). Also it's pinnable which I think is a big advantage. All for a price.
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| Fabulous Fit Dress form |
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| Fabulous Fit Fitting System |
The one I liked the sound of the best is
My Twin Dress Form. You make a plastic cast of your body and then pour moulding material into the cast for a replica of your body shape - kind of like a foam version of the duct tape model. Sounds time consuming but it could be worth the effort.
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| My Twin Dress Form |
What did I end up with? Well I was in budget mode and bought a "vintage" version online which I really like from a cosmetic point of view, it has character. It does have some adjustments but it's pretty limited and is less than ideal for fitting. So I may have to go looking for a better solution again soon.
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| Front view |
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| Back View |
Do you use a dress form? If so, what kind and why? Any recommendations?
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it's rather lovely! Would be nice just to drape work-in-progress garments on even if it's not super-useful for fitting. We bought an old one for the shop but haven't really worked her out yet so it's really just for display. I agree with you about the modern Singer-type ones. Not cheap enough to think 'give it a whirl' and not convincing enough (or pretty enough) to invest in. So I'm still just self-fitting on my own body for now.
ReplyDeleteSelf fitting is really a work in progress for me but the mannequin does give a good start point.
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