Want a perfectly-fitted dress dummy? Get a turtleneck or longsleeve t-shirt you never want to see again, several rolls of duct-tape and a patient friend. Put the shirt on over whatever undergarments you plan to use with the finished clothing (ex: corsets for reenactors, or your favorite style of bra, Spaw) Have your friend start plastering six-inch lenths of the tape in all directions on the outside of the shirt's torso, until it assumes your shape and gets pretty stiff. Have your friend slice the shirt open down the center back so you can escape, then insert a hanger across the shoulders and a pillow in the bodey cavity, stitch the thing back up, and you've got an instant double. If you hang a chain from your workroom ceiling, you can then hang the dummy at your height from the floor, so you can get a rough cut on pinning up hems without bothering your friend again.

After decades of doing costumery for reenactors, I have a corpse's gallery of these easy dummies hung from curtain rods slung from my workroom ceiling. I use a window hook to fetch down the one I want to hang from the "working chain", which has colored marks on the chainlinks corresponding to marks on the neck of each dummy-hanger, so I know how far off the ground to hang the thing. Works great!

Lynn