DIY Dress Form Intro: The Ultimate DIY Dress Form Tutorial Overview

Interested in learning to make your own professional quality custom dress form for around $100?

This is PART 1 of my Ultimate DIY Dress Form Tutorial where I show you how to make a professional and functional personalized form that looks like this: 

Finished Dress Form!  (It's almost too realistic... )

We will be using these materials:

             *medical plaster wraps, 

             *construction foam, and

             *PVC pipes 

             *Quilt padding

             *4 way stretch knit fabric

     I took on this project last year when I decided as a designer I was way overdue for owning a functional dress form.  However, I just didn't have the budget to spend the $300-$600 it would cost to get a decent and professional form.  (I don't care what anyone says... those adjustable forms you can get at the craft store are a joke, if you know anything about draping.)  I had made a DIY dress form several years ago with my bestie, Megan Winn of The Binding Bee, but it was never very functional and I left it in Indiana when I moved to Austin to pursue fashion design.  I decided it was time to try again and do a better job.

Here is the only picture I seem to have of my first DIY dress form, with one of my earliest projects:

     You can find a million tutorials on duct tape or kraft tape forms.  The reason Megan and I chose kraft over duct tape was because I had read many comments about duct tape being very heavy and sticky, and just the weight of the duct tape would eventually make the whole thing sag out of shape.  Our kraft paper forms were vaguely successful.  My biggest critique with making a form using tape is that you can't stick pins into it, which almost negates it's usefulness.  The pins get very sticky and are instantly ruined, which also happens with duct tape forms.

     I think by now a lot of people have figured out that you can make a mold of yourself and then fill it with foam to make a much more functional form that you can stick pins in.  When I embarked on this project about a year ago, I found two VERY helpful tutorials that followed similar methods using medical plaster wraps to make a fantastically accurate mold of the body, and then the forms were filled with expandable foam from the hardware store.  Unfortunately one of the tutorials seems to have disappeared except for some pictures and broken links.  However, I'll still list both of them for you so you can cross reference:

Part 1 by Jenna Sauer
Part 2 by Jenna Sauer
http://www.burdastyle.com/projects/diy-dress-form-for-men
 You can see how incredibly professional this one looked in the end, which was hugely inspiring to me.

Overall, the process is broken down into these stages:

Part 1: Building the mold and stand

Part 2: Filling mold with foam

Part 3: Covering the form

And we're finished!

I'll be posting Part 1 soon... in the mean time, check out my clothing line Katastrophic!

Ready to move on?  Here's Part 1 and Part 2 and the final segment, Part 3!