Sangazure immortal

Before I start talking about dress forms... yesterday's post didn't go down too well, did it? My own fault; I used the M-word in the title, and a lot of people are unduly frightened of maths. The reason for this is almost always poor teaching at some point. In other subjects, if you have a sub-par teacher for one or two years, you can catch up fairly easily later. In maths, unless you have both a strong natural aptitude and excellent textbooks, you will struggle, because, unlike something like history or geography, it has a natural progression. If you were not properly taught what a square root is, for instance, you will be all at sea when it comes to dealing with complex numbers.

However, a lot of crafting is intrinsically mathematical, and most crafters have an instinctive understanding of mathematics that they would completely fail to recognise if it were laid out on paper. I recall a story about the physicist Richard Feynman, who was brilliant, but sadly also quite sexist. He overheard a conversation between two women, and was absolutely stunned to find that they were talking about group theory; this is a branch of mathematics dealing with sets with certain specific properties. But when he listened further, he was disgusted to realise that they were in fact talking about knitting, which, obviously, was entirely beneath him as a distinguished physicist with a Y chromosome. And I tell this story not so you can laugh at Feynman, but to point out that if he had written down the mathematical notation for what these women were talking about, they would not have been able to understand it; and yet they did completely understand the concepts behind it. So, there you go, you're more of a mathematician than you realise.

Anyway, this is Lady Sangazure, my faithful dress form. She's not my first dress form, but I expect she'll be my last. For a little while, back in the dim and distant past, I had a cardboard one; my mother had no further use for it and my sisters didn't do dressmaking to any great extent, so I acquired this thing, and let's just say I can see exactly why they're not made any more. You could adjust it, and you did so by inserting various tabs into appropriate slots, which worked up to a point, but if you were any distance away from the average figure it was inclined to struggle. When I was younger I was wasp-waisted and hip-heavy, and my hip spring was rather too much for the cardboard dress form, so the tabs kept popping out of the slots. Also, the back waist length was a serious problem. I can't remember now whether you couldn't adjust it at all or you simply couldn't adjust it enough; I was and still am short in the back, though I used to be spectacularly so and now am within normal limits. My back hasn't extended with age. The thing is that, for the back waist length, you're measuring over a curve, and in my twenties and early thirties I didn't really have one. I was pretty much straight down from neck to waist. These days I'm nicely rounded out, and my back waist length reflects that. But, in any case, the cardboard dress form was not ideal, and I didn't entirely miss it when it eventually fell to bits from over-use.

I managed without one for several years, until eventually I saw a static dress form on eBay and decided that this thing had potential. By this time my figure had changed a good deal, and was much closer to the average (though I still had a short back and, as it turned out, went in rather more at the waist than the static dress form did). However, I don't tend to make anything that is tight around the waist except for trousers, and I don't use a dress form for those; the bust and hip measurements were about right, so I reckoned it would probably do.

And so the Bumless Wonder, as I immediately nicknamed it, arrived. (Seriously. It had no bum at all, just a sort of rounded plinth in the hip area.) It was made from expanded polystyrene, so you could pin it (which you never could with the cardboard model, so that was an advantage straight away), and it had a stretch nylon cover which turned out to be the very dickens to get on, and a nice wooden stand. However, it wasn't long before I realised my bust measurement was increasing and something had to be done about this. Naturally my first idea was to put one of my bras on the Bumless Wonder and pad it out... and this was where I ran right into the classic cup size problem. My bra wouldn't fit. It was way too small in the back for the Bumless Wonder, because that was a B cup and I was, at the time, I think a D or a DD.

I sighed, gave the Bumless Wonder away to a lady at church with the right set of measurements, and ordered Lady Sangazure (it did help that she was on offer at the time). She's still not perfect, but she is way better. I can adjust her bust, waist, hip, back length, and neck (though I don't leave her adjusted to my neck measurement, as my neck is very narrow and that can put strain on the adjusters; usually she is as shown in the photo, and I just pull the neck in when I'm doing a neckline). She's still a B cup, because everything is, and I'm now wearing an E (and still expanding, from the look of things); so I can use her for an initial attempt at bust shaping, but for a perfect fit I do need to make a toile and try it on.

But no commercial dress form accommodates Sibyl. And Sibyl is, naturally, a fitting issue.

So I just took a colostomy bag, drew round it, added a seam allowance, stitched it up into a pouch, attached some lengths of cotton tape to it, stuffed it with toy stuffing, and fastened it into the required position. It's hardly elegant, but neither's Sibyl, so there you go. And, while I'm completely open about her existence and her various evils (I'd have problems otherwise, since it would be quite difficult to explain why I struggle to get out in the evenings), I'd rather the little wretch didn't actually draw attention to herself; so Lady Sangazure's pouch provides a useful guide to how well whatever I'm making is going to hide her. (The concert skirt, incidentally, is marvellous in that respect. There are so many folds that I could be hiding a rugby football under there, let alone Sibyl, and nobody would notice.)

And I can pin everywhere, including the pouch... I'm not going to draw you a picture of what would happen if I had pins anywhere near Sibyl!