Comparison’s of FBA’s

If you’re not interested in Full Bust Adjustments, please look away now. If you are, here is a little comparison of some of the techniques I’ve been trying recently. All were done on t shirts, partly as I figured that jersey is a forgiving fabric fitting wise, partly as I had some burning a hole in my stash, but mainly because t shirts are what I usually wear and so are the kind of thing I want to make.

Some FBA’s wot I have done

I’ve made a couple of Birgitte T shirts recently , so I thought I’d overlay some different adjustments too see how they differ. The green line is the unaltered pattern (in large size, not that I think that makes a difference and fairly obviously the v neck option).

The turquoise line is the Easy FBA from Maria Denmark that I used for my black v neck t shirt with red accents. The armscye seems to stick out a lot further than the rest on this one – which makes sense if you know how the pivoting was done to get this adjustment. But by the time you get down to the hemline this adjustment has blended back to the normal patter line (hence this one being a tighter fit around my girth).

armscyes

Next up is the full FBA done via Maria’s original method, where you pinch out the dart you’ve made and ignore the bump. This is drawn in purple. I haven’t actually made up a t shirt via this method, I used it as a step towards on the way to her new improved FBA method, where you eliminate the dart “properly”. Now, I must point out that after I traced this onto my pattern I realised that somewhere in constructing this the bottom half of the pattern had shifted of the fold line somewhat – whoops. So bear this in mind when looking at how it alters the pattern nearer the waistline, that bit kind of needs rotating back to line up on the fold line. I think the armscye is pretty accurate though and in this area it’s very similar to the new improved method that I actually used.

Wobbly pattern drafting

Finally, in red is the proper FBA with the extra step to eliminate the dart that I used on my scoop neck Birgitte t shirt. I said last time that the purple line is pretty much a step on the way to this, but when I saw how skewwiff that step was I redid it as part of forming this FBA (but didn’t re trace everything, sorry, was a bit lacksadasical). This fit worked best for me, but that was partly because it adds to the waist measurement, which worked for my current body shape.

Waistline differences

It just remains for me to say, it’s not that hard to do, I can get a t shirt out of a metre of jersey (and have enough left to make some undies for long suffering hubby) and you’ll get enough change from a tenner to buy a cup of coffee, what are you waiting for?