 Guys, welcome back to my Butterick 6873 sew along. If you are following along in the free workbook that you can get on my website, link in the description box, then you know we're working through the project checklist in the prepping section. We have already pre-washed our fabric. We've completed the Fast Fit Worksheet. That was the last video. And today we're gonna talk about pattern alterations. So I have put the pattern, like I'm basically tissue fitting the pattern onto my ditto form. If you're new here, the ditto form is an exact replica of my body, can you tell? I basically did a 3D scan and then they took all of that information and made it into this dress form. I don't know, it's kind of like magic. So I'm able to tissue fit on myself without anybody else being here. It has made such a difference in my life in terms of less frustration, better accuracy. Like I'm just so much happier doing the alterations process. But I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna tissue fit it on here and show you kind of my thought process behind the alterations that I'm gonna make. Now obviously we're not all gonna make the same alterations. This is just getting you kind of critically thinking about how your clothes fit, how things should fit and some things that you should look out for as you are considering alterations to your pattern. Okay, so let's get to it. Okay, so when I am going to put a pattern up on my ditto form, I first start with the shoulder seam because we always alter from the top down, okay? So I've got my shoulder seam. I have placed that shoulder seam on my shoulder which you can see the top of my shoulder is right here. You can see I have a pretty significant slope that comes into play sometimes, not always with this pattern, it absolutely doesn't. Then I go to the back, the back comes next and I smooth all of that out and down, okay? Then I'm able to determine the waistline. Now I am short waisted. You can see there's only like six inches between my bust and my waist. That's okay. So I almost always have to remove one or two inches from patterns. So I move the waistline up, perfect. Now the back is done. So I swing back around to the front, do the same thing to the front. I'm assessing my bustline, which you can see is off by maybe three quarters of an inch. And then I come down to my waist and I do the same thing. I move my waistline up to my actual waistline here, okay? Then I smooth everything out, making sure that it starts from the shoulder and comes down. Now, some things in this pattern specifically is this line here. This you want to make sure is going to lay close to your body and that there's no gaping. And whenever I smooth everything down, pin things where they're supposed to be, this looks good. When I am assessing the outer shoulder, which will actually be a little bit more like this and smooth this down, because this is such a loose fitting top, the actual bustline, I'm not super, super concerned that it's not exactly exactly at my bustline. If they were off by a few inches like the waistline is, that's a different story. The one thing that I do want to pay close attention to is this bust dart. And I want to make sure that it is pointing to my bust apex, which it is. Ironically, it's not pointing to this, which normally it does, it's pointing a little bit down and over. So that worked out in my favor. So the bust dart is where it should be. The waistline is where it should be. The bustline, good enough, shoulder looks great. So I'm actually pretty okay with the bodice with just making that one waistline adjustment. Next, I come to the skirt and I have pinned the skirt on, matching up the waistlines. And this skirt, because it is so roomy, I'm not necessarily assessing it for fit. Instead, I'm assessing it for length. So what I'm trying to get away with, because like I said, this pattern is a bit of a fabric hog, is seeing if I can cut the shortest skirt length and still do the cutesy little ruffle, because the ruffle is what I really like. You have the little flouncy thing, but it can't be too short. So I got it pinned. I have it pinned along the side seam. And then this little bit that's folded up is the length of what will be the ruffle front. It's hard to tell on a dress form if that is going to be long enough. But I did do the major check, which is along the back. I pinned the back ruffle, matching on the side seam where it should match to see in relation to the bottom of my bum. How much longer is this skirt going to be? And is that enough room? Is it long enough so that if I bend over, nobody's going to see everything I got? It's just a little bit of a battle, a little bit of a guessing game. This looks okay to me. Like if I were to imagine all of this is a dress, right? And this is my little ruffle. It is flouncy, right? It is gathered up a bunch, so it is a little bit flouncy. That makes it a little bit shorter. But I think for the design of this, I kind of want to do this sleeve because it's like a fallish, it's wintertime almost. So if I do this sleeve and we have the fuller bodice, I just, I think I want a short skirt to balance that out. I feel like this is just a lot. That's not me. If I'm going to have a fuller bodice, I want a short skirt. I don't know why. Is that like a fashion rule? I have no idea. But to me that feels more balanced and shows that I have something of a body even though this is kind of loose fitting. It'll show my teeny waist and then it'll show like a little bit of thigh, knee, and leg. So, biscuit agrees, right? So I think that that's going to be okay. We will find out. We're all on this journey together. So with all that said, and after checking my fabric, I'm going to do view B bodice with the view B shoulder and the length of B's skirt with the flounce of A added on here. Okay, so once you assess what alterations need to be made, you need to make them. The first part was easy. I just folded along my waistline that I marked with a pencil and then folded that up. So I removed the inch or whatever it is. Yeah, just about exactly an inch that I needed to remove because my waistline is so short. It is running into this dart. This, can you see how many layers of paper are here? This was a bit of trial and error. I got it as close as I could, I think. When I fold up the dart, this is as close as we're going to get on this. So it's going to be filled in through here. This is going to be a nice, pretty smooth line and then it's going to come down here like this. I could have kept adding more and more paper to it, but it was getting to be a little bit ridiculous. At this point, I probably need to just trace this off and make it really pretty over here. And again, the same thing with here too. It seems like when you lift this up, this whole line here becomes shorter, shorter this way because you've lifted it this way. So you have to add in to your waist, to your side seam and then you have to fill in through here as well, like that. And that becomes our new front line. So here's the back. There's my, this is my waistline. So I'll come in using the center back as my grain line like this. It should also match up with the line of the waistline, but this gets folded up and then the waistline of the pattern comes down to match that. Using your little curved rulers, you can settle this right in here and draw that back in. Add the little leg for the bottom and, all right, that's my new back. All right, for the skirt, because I'm shortening it, normally it's very easy. You just chop it off at the new cut line, good to go. But because the view with the flounce has the little curve to it, it's not that simple. I tend to make things more difficult for myself without realizing it until it's too late and I'm committed and I'm excited, but it can be done. So what you need to do is do not cut along view B like I did, taped it back together. What I did was is I measured up along the center front enough inches so that it would clear this little point here. So I probably went a couple inches too high, but better be safe than sorry. It's gonna be the same result. Then you turn this up until you reach the point where it matches the length of the skirt back along the side seam at the stitching line. So those are the same, those are going to match. Okay, so that's how much I'm removing, which ends up being, what is that? Three inches, one, two, roughly three inches. So again, you have to fill this in through here and remove this and grade this out so that that matches that same curve as the other skirt. All right, lastly, check your work. It's much easier to make changes now than it is after you've got your fabric all cut out. But this is her. I know it looks like a tunic, you guys are thinking. This girl's dress is gonna be really short. It's gonna be fine, it's gonna be fine. But yeah, she looks really good. I got the waist exactly where it needs to go. I trued up the side seam really beautifully along here. Everything looks horizontal where it's supposed to be horizontal and vertical where it's supposed to be vertical. I mean, obviously this is kicking out a bit because it's paper, not fabric, but you guys get the idea. I think she's gonna be really cute and I think the idea of having like a bigger shoulder, tiny waist, bigger skirt with a ruffle on the bottom is going to be really, really cute. But can you imagine six more inches? What did I say? Seven more inches on the bottom of that? It's gonna be just, just fine. After that, just kind of checking and double checking and making sure that everything's trued up and everything's gonna come together as it should once I get my fabric cut out, which brings me to the next video in the so long will be all about cutting fabric. The cutting layouts for this pattern are a little bit funky. They're not just your usual fold your fabric in half and cut out two of every piece, two mirror images of every piece. So that's why it's getting its own separate video. So finish your alterations, get all of that applied to your pattern pieces, get your fabric ready to go and we'll talk about cutting fabric in the next video.