Flannel With a Bust Adjustment

As anticipated, the original Granville pattern is going to need a full bust adjustment. Everything else is close to fitting well, except for the chest. So I took the original pattern and got to work. 

Here is a good instructions page for all the details on a bust adjustment: HERE

The red represents the three lines needed to begin. There are hinges created at the arm, and at the dart point. When looking at the first muslin, I measured 3 inches total that needed to be increased across the chest. Because the pattern above represents half of the total chest width, the adjustment needs to be halved as well. So the total spread of the adjustment equals 1.5 inches.

Here is the slashed and spread pattern. On the left side of the picture you can see a fourth cut, which is used to adjust for the change in length that occurs during the spreading.

The original pattern fit very well through the waist, except for along the side seam, where it flared out too much. There was a little poof of fabric there, in the muslin that needed to go. The bust adjustment was going to add 1.5 inches to the width of the waist also, creating a lot of extra fabric in the waist. To compensate for all of this, I took a risk, and changed how I spread the bust adjustment.

At the bottom of the picture, you can see where I moved the right side back in, towards the center front. I made sure to only move the right side of the pattern, and not change the straight line of the shirt front opening. I wasn’t sure if this was going to mess up the grain line or not, but so far, hasn’t seemed to be a problem.

Next, was to bring in the width of the shoulders. This is a very simple adjustment to make on most patterns and makes a big difference in look.

The blue line represents the slash, with a hinge being created at the arm. The red is the adjustment stop point. Usually, I would slash a little further down the arm to create less distortion in the curve, but there was already enough going on down there.

After the piece is moved in, there is a small notch to fill back in with paper. Or, you can create a second hinge like I did here when adjusting the back yoke. Remember to adjust both the front armhole, and the back yoke when making this adjustment. Otherwise, there will be a width discrepancy where the two pieces meet at the shoulder.

The small hump seen on the right side edge easily smoothed over during cutting or with a curved ruler on the paper.

The last major adjustment was to reduce the hip flare. 

Here I graded the pattern down in size. This is the little poof of fabric at the side seam, that needed to go. I had measured approx. an inch of excess in the muslin, and size 4 corresponded well.

Sleeves were also adjusted to length, using the folding method. These sleeves were reduced in length by about 4 inches.

All the patten pieces were mended together with extra paper and tape and then it’s time to start cutting.