Rediscovering My First Dress Form and What I Plan on Fixing on It

I’ve been in the process of cleaning out my things and deciding if I should either sell them, give them to friends of mine, donate them, or throw them away. While in the middle of my clean out, I discovered my first dress form. I photographed many of my first costumes and sewing projects on it. It is a very sentimental item in my sewing supplies, but over time I began to favor my other Dritz dress forms to it. Over time, it began to show a lot of wear and tear. Since it wasn’t holding up as well as my other dress forms, I seriously considered donating it, but, after taking a good hard look at it, I decided to keep it.

Since I decided to keep it, I wanted to talk about what didn’t wear so well on it and my future plans for the dress form.Here’s what the dress form looks like today…

I purchased this dress form off Amazon ten or so years ago. Even though the measurements of it was not the same as mine, I was still happy to own an actual dress form. The dress form is still available on Amazon today, but at a higher price.

Overall, the dress form has aged well. It can still be used and it looks great in photographs. Even though the dress form looks really good, after ten years of use, it has some problems.

The first problem is with the fabric covering…

The fabric covering is a very thin, light weight knit fabric. Over the years, the fabric has developed runs in it. (The photograph above is one of those runs in the fabric) I would like to remake a cover for it. I think I will also try to pad the dress with batting from before I put the new cover on it. I haven’t decided if I would like to pad the dress form to my size or just a small layer of patting to help protect the plastic core. (I’m leaning towards not padding the form to my size. My torso measurement is longer than the dress form, so it will be hard if not impossible to make the measurements accurate.)

The second problem with the dress form is with the wood neck portion of the dress form…

 

The wood neck (I don’t know what it’s actually called) has fallen off the dress form many times over the years. Since it was dropped so many times, the wood veneer has chipped and doesn’t look really good anymore. Also, after being dropped so many times, the base and the point have begun to separate from each other.

I would like to fix the neck, but I’m not sure right now how I want to fix it. I can use some wood glue on to reattach the top to the base, but the veneer has me stumped. I don’t want to change the color of the neck (I would need to change the legs of the dress form to make it match) but I’m not against painting it. It’s something to think about.

Since I need to think about the neck and wood pieces of the dress form, I plan on working on the cover of the dress form first.

Well, that’s all for now! Thank you for reading!