Make Your Own Dress Form Mannequin

If you really get into sewing, there comes a time when you wish you had a dress form. This is a tailoring accessory that is essentially a partial mannequin on which you can shape and build patterns and customize how sewn garments fit. The dream of many devoted home seamstresses is to have a dress form that matches their own body. The closer a dress mannequin matches your own size and shape, the easier it is to fit and sew clothes for yourself.

There are two main ways to accomplish having a custom dress form. One involves saving up a serious amount of money and having one made. The other requires a bit of patience, some oversize t-shirts, a few roles of duct tape and a good friend who can help you. What we're talking about here is making your own dress form. It's not the most simple thing in the world, but it's also not impossible and it can be done relatively cheaply and only takes about a day.

I did the "tape your friend" version with a good friend of mine once. She wanted to be able to sew a gown for herself, and being a larger-sized woman, just wasn't going to be able to get a read-made dress form that matched her size and proportions. Here's how we did it.

She came over to my house equipped with two oversize t-shirts from the thrift store, several rolls of duct tape from the hardware store and her "good" underwear. She put on the bra and girdle that she would be wearing under her fancy clothes so that her body profile and bustline matched what it would be under the planned gown. Then she put on the two t-shirts. This was so that the tape wouldn't stick to her or her good underwear and would make it easy for us to cut the whole thing off of her at the end. The t-shirts came down to mid-thigh on her.

Then I started taping. The idea is to make a strong model of the torso, so I taped from her shoulders down to low on her hips. I taped up to the neckline of the shirts, but not onto her arms. The tape went on in overlapping pieces, with the first layer being horizontal, the second one vertical and the third horizontal again. I made sure to wrap the tape as tightly as I could around her, but not so tight as to make her uncomfortable.

Once all the layers were done, we cut the tape off of her. This is where the two t-shirts were really useful. The dark blue one was stuck to the inside of the tape, but the white one wasn't. As I cut up straight up the center of her back with scissors, I tried to avoid cutting the white shirt, which meant i also wasn't cutting her good underwear or her! She was then able to slip her arms out of the tape armholes.

She took the form home and taped the back seam I had cut closed. She also taped closed the neck and arm holes, and then stuffed the form to make it rigid. She rigged a broom handle up on an old chair base and suddenly had herself a perfectly form-fitted dressmaking mannequin of herself!

Sometimes what makes someone want to create their own sewing mannequin is the need to sew something out of the ordinary. Most often this is for period wear, where the body is corseted or the body profile is otherwise significantly different than the modern or day-to-day.

To make a specialty dressform the procedures are almost the same as for a regular one. For these cases, make sure the person being molded is wearing the right undergarments that give them the period shaping or body line. You will want to get extra bras, corsets or girdles so that someone's really good period underwear doesn't get accidentally ruined in the form-making process. You don't want to cut into or accidentally get plaster on an expensive corset.