Everyone has a love-hate relationship with at least one part of their body. My love-hate relationship is with my torso. I’ve always thought I have a ridiculously shrunken torso relative to the size of my bust. My shoulders are tiny and slope and purses always fall off them. If I had a nickel for every time I have had to slide my purse strap back up my shoulder as I walk to work, I wouldn’t be walking to work: I’d be walking through my vineyard and olive grove in Tuscany. My upper back is even worse, which you will see from the photos below.

Physically, I take after my father and I take after my maternal grandmother. I adored my grandmother, whose photo was beside the word “vivacious” in the dictionary. She was L-I-F-E in my mind and she remains so in my memory. I did not want to inherit her boobs, however.

When my grandmother got married in 1945 she looked like this. Eerily, when I put on her wedding dress when I was in my twenties, it fit me like a glove. I wouldn’t try that now, as it is too delicate.

My grandmother’s figure quickly morphed into what you see below, in part because she loved sweets (one divergence between us). For my whole childhood I remember my grandmother saying, “Let’s have a dish of ice cream, shall we?” alternated with her going on some kind of a ridiculous diet…

My mother’s engagement party, I think, and maybe wedding reception? 1967 My grandmother is the one on the right in the right-hand photo and the second from the right in the left-hand photo. I always thought she was beautiful, but she always thought she was “fat.” I have the opposite issue to my grandmother with her ice cream – when I’m anxious, which is unfortunately fairly often (my nature, exaggerated by stress when I was young), I tend to not feel hungry, and I’ve never had a sweet tooth. Not eating much is not great either, as it has occasionally wreaked havoc on my digestive system. When I get really “into” work I get obsessively concentrated and sometimes don’t get up for hours. It used to drive my mother crazy, and worry my friends. Best friend C. once cooked a whole chicken dinner and brought it over to my apartment while I was working on my thesis, because he was worried that I wasn’t eating much. Maybe that’s why I got myself an Italian boyfriend who is a foodie sans pareil. It used to drive me crazy that each time he called he would ask me what I ate for lunch and what I was going to make for dinner, but do you know what? He’s right. Food is so very important.* When I’m in Italy and eating all the time, I think I start to look a lot more like my grandmother, in a good way:

* To illustrate how Gianni has reformed me, a story. There’s a lemon chicken breast that they prepare at my local gourmet shop that Gianni loves. You pay by weight. One day I was running too late at work to cook dinner and so I took Gianni’s advice to buy myself a lemon chicken breast or two. I bought the breasts, but didn’t buy the lemon slices as I figured, of course, that you don’t eat the lemon slices and the breasts are already marinated, so why pay for the lemon slices unless you are having a party and putting out a platter for other people. They even ask you if you want the lemon slices, so I can’t be the only frugal person who thinks this way. I registered Gianni’s disappointment, even over the phone. Silence. “But Stefaniuccia, that’s the best part. You have the lemon slice on top of the chicken breast and then (making sound effects), you put your fork on top of the two and you press…and everything is rendered more succoso  (juicy).”  I have never again purchased chicken breast without the lemon slices.

When I was carefree and young, I also had this bosom. Feel free to laugh at the way that I used to paint my eyebrows to look like caterpillars. I don’t know what I was thinking…

 

This all led me to adopt a posture with my shoulders bent over, I think to minimize the appearance of my bust.

By the time that this photo was taken, I was already running quite a bit. When I was running competitively, my bust did shrink somewhat, but not enough for my liking. I used to worry that people would think I wasn’t training enough because my bust was still too big.  At the time I was running 160 km a week. (Oddly enough I can’t find any pictures of me running at the moment, even though I ran for ten years and completed two dozen marathons and myriad other races. I’m sure they are somewhere…)

During the running phase…

Here I am promoting fitness in Quebec :):

Anyway, that’s all to say that the best thing about my grandmother might have been her enormous hugs. I used to look forward to running to her and jumping into her arms and putting my head on her bosom. Really!

It almost seems a waste that I have this generous bust and no children or grandchildren to run and dive into it, although my “niece” likes to climb on me when I’m trying to take her photo. 🙂

That was a long prelude to explaining that I felt quite miserable yesterday as I tried to fit my first self-drafted bodice using “Il Modellismo” as a guide. I was very excited as I drew it out, as it seemed quite easy and I was confident that it would fit reasonably well. I always forget that I like doing any kind of math, even basic algebra and geometry. I was tantalized by the possibilities. When I first put it on I thought, “Not bad.” And then as I looked at it a bit more and tried to resolve fitting issues, I started to get more frustrated and despairing. Here it is raw. I look somewhat grim in these photos as I was still getting over a 24-hour flu yesterday.

 This is before I cut away the neck. The upper bodice is bothering me. If I hold my shoulders erect, the upper bodice lies flat. If I bend in any normal way, my right shoulder bends forward and a crease forms towards the neck from the right boob. There is a little bit of extra room overall, I would say, unless my shoulders are back in a good postural position. I am not sure what to do about this other than maybe start again and reduce the upper chest measurement (although I faithfully used my upper bust measurement in the calculations). Or can you pinch in the princess seams? One thing I did get right (or the author did) is that the princess seams are lying over the bust points!!

Showing the left-hand side (in the mirror). I had the revelation as I was doing this that the right-hand shoulder sits in the right place and the left hand is sitting too far back, i.e. that I need to do a forward shoulder adjustment, but only on the left-hand side, as the bodice is right now. I think this asymmetry and the asymmetry of that wrinkle thing in the front is resulting from the fact that my right boob is bigger than my left one. 😦

It probably looks best in this photo, with my shoulders back and flat, although you can see a little bit of extra room above the bust, at the armhole:

I have to show you the next photo though, because it’s hilarious! This one I can’t blame on the flu, but rather on the camera timing. I was struggling to jump on the sofa in time.

The back. I tried tucking it under and then doing a quick and dirty “short back/swayback” correction, but it didn’t look much better. Maybe I was too aggressive.

Folded under. I am not sure why it looks better in this photo.

This is after I did the quick and dirty swayback correction, but it still looks a bit wrinkly further up. It doesn’t feel loose, however, when on.

This is after I had cut out the neck and opened out the side seams about a half inch on each side. I don’t think that helped particularly. Apologies for all of the weird outfits, but I went back to this several times during the day, hoping that it would magically have transformed and would look better.

Any thoughts are welcome! Be brutal! My own diagnosis is that I need to do a small FBA on my own bodice draft (argh!) and then see if that smooths things out a little bit, and maybe start fresh with a slightly smaller upper chest measurement. Not sure. Otherwise, I think I’m going to make up a bodice today from a Burda dress from 06/2016, which is already puzzling me as I think there is negative ease, although it should roughly fit me. Gulp. I might make it up straight and then do an FBA and make up another version. I keep on telling myself to have Courage! (as the French would say to a marathoner), and as the Italians would say, Dai!  (Do it!), because now is not the time to give up in discouragement. Can you relate?

Updated: Burda to the rescue!!! I just made a quick toile of the Burda 06/2016 104 dress. I did a small FBA (less than a cm on each side, just to see), and this is what I got:

I’ve pinned about a half cm out of the front neck in this photo.

A pretty good start on a close-fitting bodice, I would say. I just need to pinch a bit out of the front neck area and I could increase the FBA slightly. Apologies again for the scraggly appearance! The shoulder seams are quite far forward on this bodice, but that’s a design thing, seen in the technical drawing.

Update 2: I destroyed my living room in the process, but I got a decent dress muslin out of it. Just a tiny bit of gaping at the neckline and I could possibly increase the FBA slightly. Phew. That was a long road.