Why won't this body block fit better on me? How comes I keep changing the slope of the shoulder when they clearly don't fit well, and the change is even more wrong than before?
Ah! There is an answer in store.
Here's a photo, of me in a jumper I knitted:
I saw this and thought to myself: oh, rounded upper back...
Did that sink in? Did that mean anything to me? Did that lead me to any kind of 'Oh my gosh, that's it!' insight?
No, of course not.
It should have done.
I have a lovely body block drawn to my very own measurements. There are small darts at about the mid shoulder in the back piece. To my utter shame I have to admit that I kept looking at that itty bitty tiny little dart and decided: oh, I don't need that!
And off it went. Suppressed, removed from each and every single pattern I draw from this body block and unfortunately also suppressed from my consciousness.
Well!
It really ought to have told me something when changing the slope of the shoulder just doesn't produce the desired result (because it takes from both back and front, probably in equal measure). A dart starting at the middle of the back shoulder and going down sits at 90 degrees angle to that alteration - of course it's going to produce a different outome!
Duh. Now why didn't I think of this earlier? This whole threedimensionality business that bodies are subject to seems to be a really complicated affair.
There really is nothing better than having a friend take lots of photos of you in the offending garment: from the front, from the back, about three snapshots from the side: the side of a garment can sometimes not be clearly seen with the arm hanging down (1), so arm forward (2) gives a different view than arm back (3). So that's five pics.
You might want some more detailed shots that are closer up.
Pinching excessive fabric out and photographing the before and after can also be very helpful.
Get yourself those photos (making sure the lighting is suitable), study them! And think about where the fitting issues might come from. Some of the time my first inclination (change the shoulder slope) only serves to complicate the issue because it tries to solve a problem that wasn't there (like sloping shoulders. I hope we can agree that my shoulders do not slope to a pronounced extent?).
I would love to hear about insights you might have had that turned out really useful. Has something like this happened to you? At least hard-won insights do tend to stick around longer, that's an advantage!
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