Made the Bootstrap Fashion Dress Form: Meet Penelope!
After doing lots of research and seeing everyone else’s DIY dress forms and thinking to myself, “I don’t think I can execute that,” I finally made one!! I’ve been eyeing this pattern for about a year now and wanted to wait until my sewing skills were a bit better to attempt. I’m definitely just a hobby sewist and one that sews clothes for herself (so sometimes I do things like not match the thread color to the fabric cause I’m lazy, finishes aren’t too clean, etc.) but I told myself I wanted to make his project clean and more precise than I usually am, so I took my time with it.
Pattern: Bootstrap Fashion Female Half-Leg
Fabric: 2.5 yards duck cloth, 5 yards medium weight interfacing
Filling: used maybe a little over half of the poly-fil 5lb box
DIY stand: caster wheels with brakes, wood panel, pvc pipes, and flanges
Also, the pattern instructions said to use a zipper to connect the top of the dress form to the bottom of the dress form, but I used an *invisible* zipper! So safe to say I’m not longer scared of invisible zippers anymore hahaha
I don’t remember the website asking me for like thigh circumference or anything however.. I wish they did because the thighs are about 3 inches smaller than the circumference of my actual thighs but I still love how everything came out! By far the most challenging project I’ve done. I had to improvise some things as well. There were lots of seam ripping (because I would put right side and wrong side together multiple times and sewed it, and I also put the wrong patterns together so I ended up giving her a butt in the back and a butt in the front somehow lollll)
Everything costed me a total of ~$215 and ~22 hours to make. It was mostly expensive because of the DIY stand parts that I bought. I’m excited to learn how to drape now and start using her! I present to you, Penelope :)