Today I learned how to stuff my bra

For a lady with no head, my dress form can be awfully judgemental. She stands there, silently berating me for  having neglected her for months. The problem was that I could never get her measurements to match mine: she's a bit less, uh, developed than I am, and when I adjust her dials to fill her out a bit, her underbust and high bust measurements grow too.

There was only one solution: if the mannequin and I were going to fit the same sized clothes, she needed to be an F cup too. And that meant she'd need to start wearing a padded bra.

Before: Studies show 80% of dress forms could be wearing the wrong size bra...

The thing is, I've never stuffed a bra before. By the time I'd convinced my mother I was ready for my Punky Brewster moment, I already filled a B-cup, so bra-stuffing wasn't something I felt compelled to figure out. So finding the right stuffing took a bit of trial and error. After some failed attempts with wads of tissues (too lumpy), socks (too...sock-shaped), balls of yarn (too soft) and dried pulses (too droopy) I realised that the only way to find the right padding was to make it.

I started by placing the bra on a sheet of paper and tracing the inside curve of the underwire with a pencil. I then cut out the boob-shaped templates and two more templates, each about 5/8" smaller on each side. I then cut out four of each template from some wadding I had in my stash.

Boobs in progress: before and after grading

Then I made my two boobs by stacking the pieces of wadding and graded the edges - slicing a bit off the edge of the top layer of each size, to give them a more natural curve. To make sure everything stays in place while the dress form gets poked and prodded and pinned, I secured the layers of wadding with a few stab stitches down the middle.

Life would be so much easier if I could just sew the real ones in place...

Then all I had to do was slip the falsies into the dress form's bra and wiggle them into place. If I wanted a better effect I could have sewn a small dart in the top of each piece of fabric, so they would curve around the  dress form's bust, but the wadding I used was springy enough to bend into shape. The result was a fairly convincing pair of falsies, which sufficiently padded out the dress form's bust without adding inches to her underarm or underbust measurements -which means she can finally start wearing my clothes.

My judgemental old dressform looking a lot happier with her newly padded bra