How was your weekend?  I decided to bite the bullet and cut out my Bombshell Swimsuit last Friday and made a lot of progress on it over the weekend, but not enough to actually finish the suit.  The ruching was a little time-consuming but totally worth the end-result, and assembling the suit with the lining wasn’t as scary as I thought it was going to be.

I even gave my swimsuit a boob job, hahahahaha.

Here’s where I ran into trouble – the elastic, as seen below:

These are photos of the elastic going across the top of the suit bodice.  See how it’s rippling?  The fabric even looks like it’s stretched in the first photo, but I didn’t stretch anything at all when I attached the elastic to the fabric (I blame my presser foot and inability to adjust the pressure on my machine).

After consulting the sewing think-tank that is Twitter (thank you soooo much to Katie, Laura, Heather, Dixie, Brooke, Gillian, and Leila), I ripped out the elastic and steamed the elastic and fabric, letting it rest for awhile and recover its original shape.  Then, I reattached the elastic and stretched it slightly while stitching, resulting in the elastic being about two inches shorter across the chest.  Here’s what I got:

(Cue “wah wah wah” sound, or Nelson from The Simpsons saying “ha ha!”)

Yes, it’s a boob shot.  But you can see in the picture that the rippling is gone, now it’s just gaping across the chest.

Here’s what I think – I need to size it down on the sides because it’s too big in the chest.  When trying to decide what size to make, I used what my bust measures wearing a bra as the number to go by and cut out a size 8 for the top, grading it to a 10 from waist to hip.  However, I think I should have gone with a smaller size because there’s no way I measure that without some oomph and padding.  Even though I added push-up cups to the lining (hey, it’s a Bombshell Swimsuit, after all), it’s still not cutting it.  My chest is too narrow for the width of the bodice.

So, with that being said, I’m going to take out the elastic (for the sixth time, no joke), lay my bodice on the original pattern piece, and cut the suit down on the sides by the bust since the back fits perfectly.  I’m really hoping this works!  I’d love to wear this to the beach on Saturday.

(PS: I did try my suit on in the shower and there was no sagging or funky issues other than the above mentioned, hooray!)