We have spent the past 10 Sunday mornings together in her sewing studio creating dress forms made specifically to our personal measurements. My friend is creating a new cover for an existing form so that it better reflects her current size. As I have never owned a dress form, making mine has included stuffing with poly-fil and coming up with a stand on which to put her.
Photo above: the inner support, or “bulkhead”
The pattern and instructions were purchased from Bootstrap Fashions after carefully entering my measurements on their website and providing some information about my body shape. Within 20 minutes the pattern was in my inbox. As I cut and assembled the pieces, I was impressed with how close it came to looking like a fabric version of me.
The dress form is designed with a sort of “bulkhead” on the interior that helps it keep the correct shape from front to back while it is stuffed. That is the only word I can think of to describe it. It is pulled from the memory of being a teenager growing up in a tall old house in Southern Oregon, where one sunny afternoon my Dad yelled up the stairs for me to come down. He had never raised his voice at me and I was uncertain of what to expect. He was excited, needing help to unload sheets of marine plywood and other lumber from the bed of his truck.
“My father is a dreamer,” I wrote in my memoir. “I was 16 when he dreamed of building a canvas airplane and piloting it over the Serengeti, preferably before the first World War. Reality found him in a generation and on a continent not synchronized with his flight of fancy. Furthermore, our backyard was conspicuously unembellished with the appropriate aircraft hangar. Undaunted, my father decided that, in using the same scientific principles and building materials, a sailboat on a clear mountain lake would be nearly as fulfilling. But the blueprints contained equations he had not studied in years.
“Daydreams seem more dangerous to me than numbers, and I happily plotted angles and measures while he cut and sanded.” We assembled the boat in pieces, beginning with the bulkheads, in the sparsely furnished living room. When they were complete and the sheathing pieces were cut to size, we loaded it all back into his pick-up and headed over to my grandparents’ house to borrow Grampa’s shop and his woodworking skills. He helped his son puzzle the pieces together, cut the octagonal tapered mast, and apply fiberglass.
In the row of rooms that made up the relatively narrow downstairs of our house, the sails came together. Sheets of Dacron billowed out from under the needle of my old sewing machine. We affixed a telltale atop the mast and unofficially named her The Odessa, after the marina on the lake where she first set sail. Her maiden voyage was a success.
We spent several summers pulling her up into the mountains to spend a day watching the bottom of the lake slide silently beneath us like a cool mysterious landscape, and it did feel like flying. I cannot remember how many weekends it took to build The Odessa, but it currently feels a bit like sewing a dress form has been at least as much work. My friend and I are both particular sewists, and are determined to get every seam just right. As a result we both felt “done” with the project slightly before we actually finished, and I offered to give her the contact information for my psychiatric provider in the event that I ever again suggest we do a project like this one.
Image above: Plans and Measures, Prisma and ink, by Martina.Franklin.Poole
But truthfully, I am very pleased with how my stunt double turned out and that I made her myself. Sliding her onto the stand, topping her with her own custom made “finial”, and dressing her in one of my recent sewing projects – it feels a bit like flying.
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Photos below: Sewing and adding “horizontal points of measure” of ribbon; the finished form; clad in a recently made dress (pattern by Style Arc)
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