Chic Expectations - Muslin the First

This is my first muslin for the Matthew Williamson Burdastyle Dress. It's great practice for making the pockets and seams match up in the front, and for sorting out the orientation of the pieces. For example, I already tripped up with the back pieces, forgetting that because of its deep V, the back piece has a very short CB line. As a result, I made have added some seam allowances in the wrong places.

The whole fitting and pinning process was a lot of trail and error and took about 3 hours.

There were a number of size and fit issues that had to be tackled, namely it's far too big. The back is also far too long and baggy. You can roughly see on these photos where I drew in the corrections.

The bodice is too long so I pinned the dress waist seam to my actual waistline and tucked out a horizontal line across my midriff. I've pinned out the side seams to make the size generally smaller ad I've also taken a few inches out of the centre back to make it shorter/accommodate a swayback. There are still a few drag lines in the skirt, but it may be due to the zip being pinned and distorted. I'm going to wait until the next muslin before fixing this.

There was a lot of extra room in the top of the dress around my shoulders; I know that the neckline is supposed to follow the line of the collarbones, and that it will hit the flat part of my shoulders so I taped this in place and then pinned out the excess width in the centre front. There was still a lot of room around the bust and upper bust so I spent some time experimenting with darts to make the dress more fitted. You can see in the photo above there are darts going up towards my shoulders. I decided to take them out and just put them in the usual place for darts.

Granted, I'm still not sure what the exact flat pattern adjustment is for these darts. Do they go up to the armhole like a normal bust adjustment, or do I incorporate them into the gap for the panels...which are darts after all? Or does the pattern shape end up the same regardless of whichever method is used?

So the only major issue that remains is the shoulder blades. I can't reach there without distorting the dress so will be applying a bit of guesswork over the next few days. I reckon it's just a wedge of about 1.5 inches towards the CB tapering to nothing at the armscye...around the blue lines here:

So there we go! Any comments on the muslin? Next up: make another one, and choosing some fabric!