The Late Night Sewist

When I got home today, someone I had been expecting for a week already, had arrived. She was patiently waiting by the stairs and I was very happy to find her there. My dressmaker´s dummy!

I had wanted it for a long time, but three things had to happen in order to finally go for it – Stefania wanted me to make her a dress for her sister´s wedding, I had my birthday and thirdly, amazon.co.uk finally had one dummy that they were selling themselves, not via third parties.

Let me explain.

Stefania lives quite far from me and doesn´t have the time to get over here for a zillion dress trials, and I myself am too inexperienced in making clothes for others, so I felt I needed a “body” in her measurements to feel more assured during the process. Secondly, it is sort of a tradition for my parents not to give presents, but make a bank transfer on birthdays, so I can decide on my own. Thirdly, I had been looking around for a dummy for some time, but at the local haberdashery stores here, they are quite expensive. The cheapest I have seen was 169 EUR!

As you must have understood by now, I am a devoted Amazon customer, having bought nearly everything from ceiling lamps to underwear from them over the past few years. They also sell a variety of dressforms, but always via third party, who either don´t want to send such a thing to Greece or charge too much. Amazon itself doesn´t charge any shipping fee to Greece when one spends at least 25 pounds so you can imagine how delighted I was to see that they finally sell ONE dummy on their own.

They hadn´t added the measurements of the dummy to the product description so I spent one day waiting for them to go and get the information  and get back to me. I knew that this model comes in two sizes, S and M and was praying that they would have stocked the S. Which they had!

So it took 70 euros (!!!) and a week of waiting for the dummy to get to my door. Perfect! It is even more satisfying that the price has increased and not decreased during this time, so I am really enjoying myself right now 🙂

So seems the dummy (I think I should actually give it/her a name), standing there and wearing one of my dresses already:

And without the dress:

I know that it is not the best out there, but I guess it is still better than not having it at all. The downside is that it is made of hard plastic covered with thin fabric, so that I cannot push any pins into it, just through the fabric layer. Secondly, it could be adjustable at the waist as well. Right now the waist changes according to the chest and hip adjustments. For my body this works fine, but if I would want to make a dress for someone with a very straight body, it would be difficult to adjust the dummy very accurately.

So far so good, we´ll see if and how much help I am going to get from this sewing buddy!

PS If anyone is interested, then the dress the dummy is wearing is Simplicity (Cynthia Rowley) 2215. I haven´t had a moment to write about it yet.