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Necks are difficult and tricky things. Both in the anatomical sense that they are full of important things such as major arteries, tracheae, esophagi, vocal chords and vertebrae, but also in the fact that they are very difficult to sew garments for. Take, for example, the neck on the doublet I'm sewing. I have never drafted a collar before- I've always had a pattern to work from. Since I'm half-draping, half-drafting this from scratch, I'm kind of flying blind. Most of the directions I've found online for drafting doublets have such useful instructions as "draw a curve," or even better, "add a collar." How much of a curve? Where should it bend? How much ease should I add? I don't know these things. Oh, Internet, you have failed me. I tried to draft out the way the collar should fit with the pattern pieces laid out flat on my floor. While I can easily get the right circumference for the neck hole, I'm not sure on the actual shape. Is my shape too narrow? Is it too wide? The neck isn't really a circle, and it doesn't just pop straight off the top of the body- there's a sort of slope to the shoulders and the neck sticks out forward. Finally, after futzing with this all day (holy crap, Firefox has "futzing" in it's spell checker. Neat!) I came up with the brilliant idea of tracing the collar off of one of my Dad's shirts. Unfortunately, Dad's shirts are all three dimensional objects and don't lay out flat very nicely. I figured Dad wouldn't be too pleased with the idea of me cutting up one of his good dress shirts so I can sew a costume for my boyfriend. He can be so selfish sometimes (I'm just kidding, Dad! I still can borrow your car, right?) Some dinner and more futzing later, I came to the sorry realization that I need some sort of dress form to get this figured out. But I don't have a dress form anymore- the one that I made with Kendra was discarded after the "Dress Form Got Back, Real Person Don't Got Back" debacle of about a year ago. And the person who this is supposed to fit is working all weekend, so I don't get to see him (BOO!). However, I do have a desk chair. And that desk chair has a back. I buttoned one of Dad's dress shirts onto the back of the chair, and laid the doublet over top. I copied out the resulting collar shape from the shirt onto the doublet. With a little bit more futzing (the shirt collar overlaps, and since the doublet laces up, the doublet collar doesn't), I should have my collar. That only took a whole day.
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accomplished