Reply To: Altering a princess seam dress

[the_professors_assistantKeymaster]

hi there! sorry for the delay in response. so if I understand your question, there is a separate pattern for the the bodice and for the skirt and both patterns have a princess line. Is that correct? If this is true, you can do two separate sizes, so one size for the bodice and another size for the skirt. for the bodice, definitely choose the size based on your bust measurement and then alter the waist to fit. For the skirt, choose the size based on your hips and then alter the waist again to fit. Because you’re between sizes, I would go with size 18 for now. (I don’t know how tight the skirt is supposed to be at your hips when it’s finished but you can always bring this in a little later by making the seam allowance a little bigger or altering your pattern.) So for the waist alteration, I would just adjust the pattern piece that includes the side seam. Usually with princess seams, you have center front, side front, center back, side back. Side front and side back should be the pieces with the side seams. (You can alter all the pieces but because you’re not altering by much, I would just keep it simple and only alter the side seam pieces only. So let’s take the skirt portion and figure that between the size 18 waist is 81 and yours is 87, that’s a difference of 6cm. divide it by 4 and that means when you do the alteration, you’re only adding about 1.5 cm to the side seam at the waistline. I don’t know what size you’d be using for the bodice so this calculation might be a little different but it’s the same step in that you take the difference and divide it by 4. You would add this number to the side front and side back and when you make it, the waistlines should match up. You can still use the same steps shown in our Increase Waist Pattern Alteration tutorial, the only difference is your pattern is smaller but you still have the same pivot points. I would still recommend that you make a muslin to test your fit before using more expensive fabric. hope that helps! 🙂