 Hi, you guys! Lindsay here. Welcome back to my channel, Inside the Hymn. Today I am going to be showing you how to add darts to a shift dress pattern that doesn't have any vertical fisheye darts on the back pieces. Again, like I said in my little comparison video that I did last week, shift dresses are obviously super comfortable and really, really cute. But for those of us who are pear shaped, where our bodice measurement and our hip measurement are so far apart, you kind of lose your waist in a shift dress. Adding vertical fisheye darts is a really nice way to give the garment a little bit of shaping through the waist while still maintaining a shift style so that it looks more flattering on those of us who have larger hips and smaller busts. So this is Butterick 6447. Try and pretend if you have a different pattern than this. This has a cutout right here, which is what this is. So your pattern might look different from the waistline up. This one just has that little cutout detail. So don't let that part discourage you or confuse you too, too much. Okay, so the first place to start is kind of determining how much you want to take out of the waist. This is really kind of up to you how you want to do it. On my comparison video, I went a little aggressive because I was kind of trying to prove a point. You know what I mean? I was really trying to illustrate how much shaping you could get. So on, like I guess usually on your front pattern piece, you're going to have actual finished garment measurements. And this is what I used to determine my waist and how much, you know, I want to take out. So according to the bust, I am a 12 and according to the hip, I am a 14. So I graded between those two on the back piece. But for some reason, I didn't on the front piece. I don't know what that's about. Maybe I just got confused. But trust me, back piece on the on the side seam goes from a 12 down to a 14. And so I was assuming that by the time I got to the waistline, which is marked on the front and the back, by the time I got here, I was roughly at more of a 14 than a 12 based on how I graded out. So I am using the actual measurements for size 14, which is 40 and a half. I am 33 and a half. So again, it really depends on how much ease you want, how aggressive you want to be with the shaping. You can just take in an inch, you can take in eight inches, you know, it really just depends on on what you want to do. But I decided that I wanted to have about two and a half inches of ease. I felt like that would still be comfortable, but would take it in enough to where you could really see some definition on the waist. So in order to have two and a half inches of ease, that meant that I would need to take the measurement out to 36 inches and 36 from 40 and a half is four and a half inches. So I decided on four one inch darts. Okay, you really don't want your darts to be any larger than one inch. That's that's pretty much as big as you want them. So if you want to take out four inches, you need to divide that up into at least four darts, you can do two on the back, two on the front, or you can do like I did and do all four on the back. So that's what I did for the denim version, the refashion that you guys saw last week to simplify all this and so I don't have to do umpteen darts. I'm only going to do one today. And when I do when I take out one one inch dart from each side of the back, that's going to take out a total of two inches from the waist. So my finished measurement will be 38 and a half and that'll give me exactly five inches of ease, doubling kind of what I was aiming for the first time. It's just going to be a little bit more of a relaxed fit, but you're still going to get a little bit of that waist definition. Okay, so now we are just looking at the back piece. I know I'm going to take out one one inch dart from this piece because this piece gets doubled. This is not the entire back piece. This is one half of the back. So you find your waistline, which like I said was marked on the pattern piece and using a mat like this that has the grid underneath it makes it super simple for you to draw all these lines that you need to draw. So I just lined up the grain line along a vertical line and I lined up the waistline along a horizontal line and I am going to just line up my ruler with the line on the grid and draw that in and I'm going to try and draw these pretty big so that you all can see them. Okay, so there is our waistline drawn across the width of half of the back. Now you want to measure this distance. I went ahead and did that because it can be boring to watch you measure, but I'm getting roughly 10 and 5 eighths of an inch and since we're only doing one dart we are going to center that dart along this piece. So I know I need to be around five and three eighths. So I make a little mark where five and three eighths is five and one two three eighths somewhere around there. It doesn't have to be exact. Nobody's coming after you measuring that you got the exact center. Okay, so now that we have that mark you want your widest part of your dart to be on the waistline because that's where you want most of the bulk to be taken out. So looking for a hand gauge because it's smaller and since we're doing a one inch dart that means we're going to mark half an inch on either side of this mark that we just made. So you get your ruler, you can use really any ruler, but you find the half inch line and you put one mark half inch to one side and another mark half inch to the other side. All right, now we're going to talk about the height of your dart. This pattern made it a little bit limiting because I do have this cut out here so I really couldn't go very far this way, but typically I like four inches on either side. That gives you a long nice taper dart so that there's no puckering and it just looks really nice and smooth. So let's do that. So we are right here. One, two, three, four. Again, super easy with this grid underneath. One, two, three, four. I mark another little dot there and you can actually make circles on all of these because that's how we're going to transfer the markings to our fabric anyways with these little itty-bitty circles and then you take any straight edge and you connect your dots like so. So I've got one there and you can make these longer if you like, especially if you are longer in the torso, like if you normally have to add length in your like above your waistline, you might want to make these, you know, six inches on either side. You kind of have to play around with it a little bit just to get a feel for what you like. I recommend muslinning obviously, but you can make a lot of wearable muslins doing this too. Okay, so there we have our single one inch fish eye dart. I'm also using this paper. It is called Swedish tracing paper. I got it from Nancy's Notions. I will link it in the description box below. The beauty of this paper is that it's sewable. You can sew this paper and get an idea by using a dress form or pressing it up against your body as to how this is going to work for you. So you would take this to your machine, take it over here. You're going to fold, well you fold it right sides together, but I guess it doesn't really matter for the purpose of this. And line up your dots and your lines through the paper. You can see it with your fabric. You're going to be using like pins and stuff to mark all of that. And then the proper way to sew a fish eye dart is to start in the center, backstitch, come all the way down here, pull your tails and tie it off and then start, put your needle down here again, backstitch this way, sew all the way through here, pull your tails, excuse me, and tie those off so that you get nice clean pretty darts with no puckering. So let me head to the machine, sew this up, and then I'll be back to show you what it looks like. All right, so I have sewed our dart and you can tell that there is like something happening here. And that's because when you sew the dart, it's creating kind of a three-dimensional aspect to your paper. So you can see it's trying to make this bubble here, which is great for a booty, half of a butt cheek to fit in here. And it's also, you know, pulling in our waste. That's what this is going to do all over here. So you can visualize this in a more fluid fabric, something a little more drapey than paper, which is basically any fabric is more drapey than paper. But you can kind of see, you know, what that's going to do for a figure and a body. And again, this is a pretty subtle alteration being as we only took out one inch. If you can imagine two of these, you would put them on thirds. So there would be one along the third, like one third in from here and one third in from here, you could imagine even more of it being cinched in and even more volume being created here. So that is pretty much the gist of vertical fisheye darts. Again, if you sew this and you're a little bit unhappy and you want more shaping, add one to the front. You do the same process. You find your waistline, you draw that across, measure halfway, mark that, do a half inch on either side of that dot, and then four inches on either side of that lengthwise, connect the dots and you've got a vertical fisheye dart in the front too. So but just don't take in so much that you don't have any ease left. You still want some ease, you still want it to look like a shift dress, but you don't want it to be a little bit more hourglass, a little bit more taken in on the waist. So I hope that this little tutorial is helpful for those of you who are pear shaped and need a little bit more of that shaping. If you are an hourglass figure and you have a larger bust, a narrow waist and a larger hip, this is also great for you too. So depending on your body type, this can be one of those alterations that can open up your mind and creativity to silhouettes that you might have ignored in the past. Let me know if you guys have any questions in the comment section below. Like I said, really the only product I used here today was the Swedish tracing paper from Nancy's Notions. My paper weights are from Home Depot. They are hex tiles like that go in your bathroom. This is a Dritz mat. I'm sure almost all of you have cutting mats at this point and a long Fiskars ruler, but you could you really didn't really have to have a long ruler as the one I grabbed. Anyways, I'll link all this stuff in the description box so that if you want any of it, you can find it and be sure to check out the comparison video that I did last week that shows you the same garment made up with fisheye darts and without so you can get an idea of visually what kind of change it makes. But that is going to do it for me today. Thank you all so much for watching and I'll see you very soon. Bye!