megan nielsen design diary

I’ve had a lot of requests for tutorials for doing a full bust adjustments (FBA’s) and small bust adjustments (SBA’s) for the Banksia pattern – however, since i did a really thorough set of tutorials on the theory of it during our last sewalong for the Darling Ranges dress, I’m worried i might be repeating myself.

Here are the original posts about bust adjustments:

• How to do a full bust adjustment (FBA)
• Full bust adjustments: discussion of alternate methods
• How to do a small bust adjustment (SBA)

So this is more of a quick refresher of the concepts and example of how it would look for the Banksia top.

Full Bust Adjustment

For a thorough look at full bust adjustments refer to this post on full bust adjustments and this one on alternate methods.

The basic idea is to draw the above slash lines. Slash along them, and spread the pattern along the grainline, by the amount of your adjustment. Then fill in the gaps with pattern paper and redraw your dart lines.

Small Bust Adjustment

For a thorough explanation of how to do a small bust adjustment, please refer to this post.

The idea is the same as the full adjustment above – you draw the same slash lines. However instead of spreading the pattern, you overlap along the grainline slash line, retape the pattern together and redraw the dart lines.