Here are some additional deets on how I put the white jumpsuit together.
I was able to find some additional photos of the original jumpsuit online, which helped me figure out how it was made and where the seams where.
For the top part, I used Vogue pattern V8831:
It is a loose-fitting knit top with cowl neck, princess seams and two-piece dolman sleeves. I originally chose it because it had the "custom fit" options, with different cup sizes to choose from. The two-piece dolman sleeve also turned out to be perfect. All I had to do was sew the top seam of the sleeve over the shoulder only, and leave the rest open to create the top slit.
I lenghtened the sleeve above the elbow to get the "hamac" effect, as well as below so that they would bunch up a bit on the forearm.
The princess seams where the only part that I didn't want, as the original jumpsuit doesn't have any bust shaping. My model is small busted, which made removing the princess seam easy, especially using the a-cup pattern (no sba necessary!), the curve was already pretty minimal. I just overlapped the two front pieces by the amount of seam allowance. Where the overlap was bigger, I added the difference to the side seam (which in hindsight I probably didn't need to do since I ended up taking at least 1 cm in at the sides and back seam on the final garment). I did the same thing to the back pieces.
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| Overlapping the edges of the princess seam to get rid of them. This only worked because I was working with an A cup and the curve was minimal. |
For the pants, I asked K. to bring me a pair of well-fitting RTW pants to copy.
I looked online for different techniques on how to copy RTW without taking the garment appart and ended up following this tutorial, which uses painter's tape. I copied the front and back leg and left out the waistband.
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| I used painter's tape to copy the pant legs |
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| then I pasted the tape onto tracing paper and added seam and hem allowances all around |
Next, I needed to make the top and bottom into one single pattern, since I didn't want an horizontal seam at the waist. Instead of cutting the top on the fold, I added seam allowance to the CF and CB so that it would match to the pant's center seam (crotch).
To figure out where to connect the two, I measured the distance at the "center seam" between K's waist and the top of her pants when worn (below the waistband). I made a mark at the same distance on the top pattern below the waistline and drew a horizontal line perpendicular to the Center Front.
The top of the pant pattern isn't actually parallel to the floor so I drew a line starting at the top of the side seam and perpendicular to the grainline. Then I overlapped the two lines, lining up the center
seams. Finally, I trued up the side seam between pants and top and bam, I
had a one-piece jumpsuit pattern!
For the hood, I used the hood pattern from BWOF 118-11-2007 ( I was looking for hood patterns in my stash and randomly found that one).
The pattern has darts at the shoulder line, which made it easy to measure how much I needed to add to the front and back to match the top's neckline. Once i adjusted the back, I drafted the cowl addition to the front part of the hood to match the total length of the neckline.
For modesty I didn't extend the neckline as low as the original jumpsuit, but I still wanted the cowl to drape lower than the neck opening so that it reached as low as the original. Instead of drafting a perpendicular angle at the bottom of the cowl I made it at an approx 120-degre angle. This meant I ended up with a point at the center, which I later recut on the garment to be round.
Because the fabric was so stretchy, and the neckline so wide, I didn't need to add any sort of closure, which was another big time saver.
Here's a final comparison of the original and my copy...(You can see the neck opening doesn't go quite a low on mine but the neck cowl goes about as low). Pretty good, eh?
