I started the Bra Sew-Along with Amy on her blog. That’s been a little more challenging than I like – due in no way to Amy, her blog, the sew-along or the pattern. It’s all my personal fitting challenges.

Starting a new pattern has all the challenges I first faced with the Pin-Up Girls patterns – which I have worked out for the most part. I keep telling myself once I get these patterns adjusted for me, I’ll have a new pattern that fits too. I haven’t convinced myself to rejoice over this yet, but I am ploughing through.

I’m going to sew the Danglez DB3 pattern. I’ve heard it’s a great pattern for those with smaller frames, but larger cup sizes.

A sad little side note, Danglez has closed. Just before they did, I just ordered their DB5 pattern. I’ve seen it done on a couple of blogs (Sigrid’s & Novita’s), and it looks lovely.

The first thing I changed on the Danglez was to use the correct cup size. See that Sewy Rebecca mistake I made has helped me! So, one thing adjusted correctly – and I’m sure it will be the easiest adjustment I make.

Last night I was tracing out my pattern pieces, and adding the seam allowances to them all. That went fine. But then I was trying to figure out how to adjust the Cradle to smaller wire size. Well, maybe I shouldn’t do these things at 11 p.m. It wasn’t going very well. And my brain wasn’t going between European & North American sizes very easily.

I came up with what I thought was correct, but wasn’t really sure. I posted on the Bra Sew-Along about how I was having trouble and hoped someone would be able to help.

Sleeping on it must have helped. I had an idea this morning that I think works. I pulled out my Pin-Up Girls pattern in the correct D size for me and traced that over the Danglez pattern.

Here you can see the two patterns and how I matched up them up. Using a light table, I could see both patterns and where I needed to change the Danglez to fit me. I re-drew the Danglez on a third piece of tissue paper but with the Pin-Up Girls Cradle. I did keep the lines of the Danglez to more closely look like that pattern. So now my Danglez pattern will have the original, one traced copy of the original, and my adjusted copy.

One other change so far, I changed the back of the band so it won’t ride up. The Bra-Makers Manual describes how to do this by giving it a downward hike. I tried to take a photo of that as well, but my camera really didn’t like the white tissue paper, and it turned out worse than the above picture.

So, next week, I’ll hopefully have figured out if I did the Cradle adjustment correctly or not, and may even have some photos of my progress on the Danglez DB3.

Happy creating!