The Doppelgänger, or Frankenboobs

Having, in 15 years of living history and sewing, not made anything beyond the 16th Century, I never had need of equipment beyond a mirror, flexible shoulders, and perhaps an extra pair of hands on occasion. It recently became very apparent that to advance myself further into this whole thing, I was going to need a dress form. As well as being on a very limited budget, I am an unorthodox shape - high-waisted, plump, with a relatively straight torso but extremely wide hips. My solution was to buy a cheap dress mannequin in a smaller size and butcher it.

I haven't christened her yet. She's a light polystyrene shell with a stretch cover. She was unceremoniously denuded and drawn all over with lines in preparation for the carnage.

Tools used: bread knife, markers, needle and thread, measuring tape, mirror, about 0.7 metres of thick wadding, and some PVA glue which turned out to be less useful than I hoped.

First, I took my [unflatteringly accurate] measurements. As the mannequin will be corseted up, I didn't want her to be too small.The squishier, the better. I lined my jugular notch up with where hers should be and made sure our shoulders at the widest point were level.

I measured my underbust, my "overbust", my natural waist, navel, and the widest point of my hips, before plotting out the drop between my neck/shoulders and my underbust, waist, and navel to make sure they were at the correct levels as my own body. To double-check, I stood with her in front of the mirror and eyeballed the markings against myself. The dummy's given measurements are 36-26-36. Mine are about 39-31-41. Only one of our measurements coincided, or as my housemate put it I'm a size 10 at my armpits :) I also marked out the difference in my shoulder angle and drop.

The first step is to take a knife, hacksaw, whatever is handy, and cut the boobs off from the underbust line up. They were roughly the right size, but are the wrong shape and cannot be lifted or moved around. I shaved down the shoulders to match the slope of my own.

Next, to replace the bust I filled some popsocks with lentils and barley. This is a tip I saw being used by Lauren from American Duchess, and it's genius. I used the very scientific method of filling the cup of one of my bras with lentils, and then pouring them into the socks. The socks were actually quite narrow, so I improvised and split the lentils up into two socks for each boob, knotted closed and hung from the dummy's neck.

I originally had a very simple plan involving wrapping the dummy in large rolls of wadding. Almost as soon as I started, that changed to more of a patchwork approach. It will be hard to describe it all exactly, as so much involves really knowing the shape of your own body and messing around with layers to achieve a close match. You will need to contour the wadding to mirror your lumps and bumps by cutting smaller and smaller sections and mounting them on top of each other before putting them on the dummy. The wadding can also be separated into thinner bits, like tissue paper. Just pull it apart, or cut it. I contoured a lot of the wadding this way. It's quicker than sewing graded sections together.

For me, the first bit was a single layer of wadding around the middle, with a narrower piece beneath it to fill out the concave bit of the dummy's waist. My waist is not very concave..! It started at the underbust line and dropped as far as the green line marked in the photo above, and wrapped all the way around til the edges met at the back. I had intended to use the PVA glue to stick the wadding to the styrofoam, but it didn't do a great job and I ended up taking a needle to it and stitching the edges together. Next I added a sort of skirt to the end of that initial layer, complete with slightly thicker area at front for my 'pouch'.



I made buttocks from 3 layers of wadding mounted on each other, and stitched those on over the flat mannequin bum. Periodically I would measure her, and would stand us both in front of the mirror and look for tweaks that needed to be made. Extra padding went up underneath the love-handles. The gaps between sections were filled in and rounded off. I wished I had a stapler handy, to tack down the butt-cheek cleft, the small of the back, and the navel.

When I was finished, I lined us up in front of the mirror again. Most things were a close match, but I went back and added more wadding at the sides as I had not made her hips flare out high enough. I also padded the upper back a little to try to copy the curve of my back, as hers is much straighter. She won’t be perfect, but if you have a good eye for detail you will get it close enough.

I finally finished nitpicking, and re-covered her in the same cover she came with. It has compressed her a little and smoothed her out, in much the same way as wearing a pair of Spanx would. It’s a bit too tight to cover her exactly the way I’d like – it skims across her bust rather than sinking into her cleavage, for example. I am not making a new cover though. I saved her poor hacked-up boobs and used them to round out the shoulders a bit. The lentil boobs are much more firm than my real ones, but the shape is good.

I spent somewhere between 6 and 8 hours working on the alterations. It was absolutely worth the effort, as now I have a near-replica of myself to drape and fit patterns on. Total cost [not including unused materials]: about £35.