Anyone else have neck and shoulder fitting probs?

[peaches]

Its finally dawned on me that I need to make adjustments to dresses and tops around the neck. When I have a fitting problem its usually front or back neck. Scoop neck tops bag at centre front and back and slip off the shoulder. Higher necked garments seem to have an excess of fabric in the back neck. Anything with a collar is a pain. Around Christmas time I had trials and tribulations with a mandarin collar.

My two alterations books dont say much about this, apart from in my Sewing for Plus sizes there is a small paragraph about adding darts to a juliet neck or staying a scoop neck by lightly gathering and sewing tape on.

I solved one problem yesterday on a dress with a tie neckline, after trial and error I tapered in the centre back seam towards the neck and put a couple of darts on the back neck area. Of course I had to alter the tie neck and the facing!

Ideally I would like to adjust patterns so I dont have this problem but Im not sure how to do this. I think a lot of plus sized patterns are sized up from smaller sizes but they dont take into account the fact that not everyone who is size 20 has a huge neck and shoulders. I can see that I could just make the neckline less deep when Im cutting it, but if anyone else has any suggestions, please do make them.