Rotating a FBA Dart on Cowl Necks

I am by no means claiming that I'm an expert here. However,  when working on this pattern I did have an AHA! moment. The design ease through the bust was 1.5 inches. This meant that I needed to add 4 inches in total width to give myself 45.5 inches (converter to metric here).  

This pattern, the cowl tank from Simplicity 2345, has a self facing on the cowl.  Its basically the front pattern flipped up and mirrored that you just fold over.  It comes down below the bust and solves the problem of having to finish the front neck seam. Kinda awesome, actually.  So, I cut the self facing off and started with a y-bust dart. 

Y-Bust Dart, Yellow Like important later

 So here you see the three lines for cutting the  the darts,  arrows in the directions you cut.  The yellow one we don't cut yet, but you want to mark it now.  Remember to cut to the seam allowance, then snip from the seam allowance in.  That way you have a tiny hinge.

Fun with arrows.

 Ok, now we tape it to our wax paper, or whatever you have underneath.  I use wax paper cause I always put tape in the wrong place.  This is where we cut the yellow line, including the wax paper.

Here we rotate the side dart closed, opening the dart in the cowl.

 So, I kinda wasn't thinking in this spot here. I should have had some more wax paper underneath to tape and stabilize.  I ended up doing this afterwards and it was fine.  You now want to straighten your shoulder seam.  Your arm-scythe will have changed shape, but as long as the length hasn't changed you're still good.  I think in most cases I would have rounded from the shoulder  seam to the middle, giving me sort of an arch.  Since I needed a straight line across in to re-draft the self-lining, I used the part that I had cut off as my starting point.  Now I have the entire thing on my graphed quilt interfacing I use for the final pattern copy.

comparison 

At this point, what I did was cut it off at the red line. Then I put the facing on top, lining the under part of the arm-scythe up and marked where the facing would end, drawing my line across there.  I then flipped it over after tracing the rest of the pattern and traced the new self facing as one continuous piece.  

I'm sure this could work for knits and non-knits. In fact, you could even split the difference in darts if you wanted.  In wovens and more stable knits I have no qualms with adding a side bust dart. Shaping is always a good thing!

And that's it.  Let me know if you have any questions!