3/14/13: I'm Sewing for Victory! - Part Three

Decided on a quick and no-brainer lunch today (Hot Pockets! hehe), so I can devote a couple solid hours to this dress. As it turned out, I didn't even get pass shoulder pads and pattern tracing! Thought I would be much further along now than I am. I blame it on the shoulder pads. They were tricky little devils. May have been my inexperience or my shoulder quirks causing this. . . I really don't know. Whatever the case may be, I am going to walk you through what I did this morning.

Firstly, this was my shoulder problem:

In this photo, I am wearing the muslin without a shoulder pad. Because the pattern included ease at the shoulder for insertion of a pad, a large diagonal fold is visible. As I said in my earlier post, I was planning on eliminating the shoulder pad altogether at one time, but I changed my mind and decided to go with the authentic 40s look.

Last night I searched through all my sewing how-to books to find how to make my own shoulder pad. No luck. You would think this would be an easy thing to find, right? Sigh. I then went on the internet and searched for a blog tutorial (the usual procedure for me), and found one done by Casey a couple years ago. Since her shoulder pad is triangular and my pattern calls for a "triangle pad" in the notions, I decided to start off with an exact replica of hers.

This is how it turned out:

This pad has three layers of cotton quilt batting. Very easy to follow how-to, by the way!

I inserted the shoulder pad while wearing the muslin and this is how it looked:

A little better but I still see some rather large folds extending from the shoulder.

I went back and made another shoulder pad that had five layers of batting. This is it:

 And this is me wearing it:

Looked like I was on the right track. The pad's thickness was good but the triangular shape was not filling in all the necessary areas. So while wearing the muslin and pad #2, I made pencil markings where I thought the pad should extend to. I took off the muslin and transferred these markings and measurements to paper to make pad #3:

This pad has five batting layers and as you can see, I made a curved pad instead of a triangular one. I also tried to mimic the curve of the armhole.

Here is what it looks like in use:

Best one yet! All I notice is the bit of gathering at the off-set, shoulder seam--just the way it is suppose to look like.

Whew! It was a battle but now I'm ready to move onto the actual fabric cutting. Before then, however, I have a pattern tracing tip to share with you. Be expecting that tomorrow!