Welcome to Seamwork pattern hacks where I show you how to hack patterns. In this pattern hack
I'm going to be showing you how to take a regular darted bodice and turning it into
a bodice with princess seams. Princess seams help you to create really smooth curvaceous lines so
if you are particularly busty and you have a hard time kind of avoiding that like cone boob Madonna
effect, then princess seams are a really great solution and I'm going to show you how to do them.
Okay so I'm going to show you how to make some princess seams. There's a bunch of different
variations on princess seams - the two classic ones are either a shoulder seam princess or an
armhole princess that runs from the armhole to the waist. I'm going to show you a shoulder seam
princess today. I think it's worth mentioning that there's a ton of variations on this you can have
basically a princess seam as any bodice seam that intersects the bust apex um so that the shaping
can kind of get absorbed into that seam, which you'll see when I show you this technique um so
you can actually have a lot of fun with this but I think it's really nice to learn the foundations
first and then you can kind of play and have fun. All right let's get started. So the first
thing we're going to want to do is find our bust apex and the easy way to do this is to draw lines
down the center of each of your darts and where those meet should be your bust apex.
I'm going to draw a little circle there just to kind of emphasize it,
then I want to draw a set of lines that connect my bust apex with my waist dart legs.
Next, I need to find um my placement for my shoulder princess seam so if you're working on
a pattern with a shoulder dart like I am here, then you can use this to help you find that.
If your pattern does not have a dart here, that's cool just mark it right in the center
but mine does so i'm just going to measure
that is like a scant 2 and 3/8 away so I'll measure the same thing right here.
Scant usually means like a about a sixteenth of an inch shy. So there we have that marking,
now we can draw in our front princess seam. We'll get rid of the back because we don't
we don't need it quite yet.
So to draw that princess seam, you're going to use a curved ruler like I have here and you're
going to draw a nice smooth subtle line that connects your shoulder mark with your bust apex.
So
this, I'm using the like barely curved part,
it's pretty subtle little curve there. All right, now I'm going to draw in some little reference
marks for um notches because notches are going to make sewing this a lot easier when we get
to the sewing part. So I'm going to cross mark this line here two inches up from the bust apex
on either, marking on kind of both sides so that when I cut along this
line I have a notch on each side and then I'm going to do the same thing on these
dart legs here. Two inches and then two inches on this other side too. You'll see why in a minute.
All right
now we can start cutting our pattern. First, we're going to remove this wedge of paper
from the dart leg to the apex
so like I mentioned before princess seams allow us to shape the bust without the use of darts so
we're going to make our, we're going to eliminate all of these darts.
All right and then now we can cut from the bust apex to the shoulder seam
and we have an almost princess seam at this point. Next, what we're going to want to do is we're going
to eliminate our bust dart here so I'm just going to cut along the existing dart legs to do that.
Get rid of that dart and what we want to do is we want to close this dart and we also want to create
a little bit of extra ease through this curve to create a nice soft bust,
so we're going to take care of both of those things with one step. I'm going to cut from the
best apex to the dart tip leaving a little paper hinge and I'm going to close up the dart and it's
going to open up just a little bit that's like maybe slightly over a quarter of an inch of ease.
So now all we have left to do on our front bodice is to create a nice little curve here
um and then we can add our seam allowance. So I just need a little piece of paper so
grab a piece of pattern paper and slide that beneath your side front bodice
and you can tape it in place just right at this little wedge here.
Take a curved ruler, french curve and you are just going to smooth out this line a little bit
and you might end up in that process you know snipping off little baby wedges of your
existing pattern. That's totally fine, we added that little bump of extra ease there so don't sweat it,
and then we can just cut along
your new princess line.
I always just trim away any kind of excess pattern behind my pattern piece to clean it up.
So now you have your front princess seam and you can see here
that when you're sewing it, you'll align at these notches and you'll have a little bit of
extra easing to do here but it's just a quarter of an inch and it's part of
having really beautiful princess seams - you'll ease that in and sew your curve line up at that notch
and then you've got a princess seam. All that's left to do is match that on the back,
which the back is actually the easy part. All right so like I said, the back is actually
the easiest bit of the princess seams, all I'm going to do is I'm going to take
my ruler, curved ruler I'm going to use this one and I'm going to draw a slightly curved line
that connects the inner part the most central part of this dart to
the central leg of this dart and in that process you might end up cutting off
or you know intersecting a little bit of the dart. That's okay, it's not a big deal.
You want to make sure that you're creating a nice smooth line. So you
can see here a little bit of this dart is going to get cut off if that's okay
and then I'm going to draw a second line doing,
that's connecting this dart apex to
the opposing dart apex on
the shoulder seam
and we don't have a lot of slashing and spreading to do here just some cutting> I'm going to cut
from the waist along my center waist dart leg
and then follow that center most
little cut line until it connects with my shoulder dart leg and then I can cut along there
and then I can just repeat on
the other side of both darts. So I'm removing both wedges that are
constituting my dart, my existing darts.
If you have any little, you know jagged little bits you can smooth them out
with your curved ruler. Here I'm just going to shave literally
like a 1/32 of an inch off right here just to create a little bit of smoother transition.
And there you have it - this is our back bodice with princess seams and then we have our front bodice
with princess seams. All that is left to do is add seam allowance to your front and your back bodice.
So in this case I will add seam allowance to all edges except the center front and maybe the center
back depending on whether you're adding a zipper or not. And that is how you draft princess seams.
I know it might seem like a lot of steps but just remember to take it one step at a time
and you'll get through it with me helping you. I'll see you next time and happy hacking!