This is going to be a very short post (holiday weekends and all that). OK, let’s hop to this, going from top to bottom:
1. The shoulder seam is too long; that needs to be shortened.
2. There is too much fabric between the shoulders and the waist; that length needs to be shortened as well.
3. We’ve got the same straining across the hip area.
Shortening the shoulder seam (done at the shoulder edge, not the neck edge) is easy enough. Feeling for the knobby sort of bone in the shoulder, I marked that spot and left myself about a half an inch for a seam allowance and cut away the rest. This is a fix that needs to be both on the bodice front and on the back, and needs to be graded into the armscye.
The too much fabric length, in this case, is a simple fix. In this case, I took a half-inch tuck (which takes down the length an inch) from the armscye on the left all the way to the armscye on the right. Now, of course this not only reduces the length of the back bodice from the shoulders all the way to the waistline, it also reduces the size of the armscye circumference in the back as well. which pulls that up a little bit in the back.
Now the next step is to get the sleeve into the new armscye and see how that looks and feels.
