De-frumping

Well, this is not what I expected to be writing about this week. In fact, until Friday afternoon this wasn't even what I expected to be sewing this week.

Yes, one of those

For the last nine years Simplicity 1587, aka The Dress of Frump, has been the nadir of my dressmaking, the benchmark of disaster. Whenever something didn't turn out as planned, from faint disappointment to major calamity, I always asked myself, "Is this as bad as The Dress of Frump?". And the answer was always, but always, "No".

On Friday I was having a tidy up/clear out when I found The Dress of Frump scrunched up in a ball under a pile of other stuff. This was a surprise, as I thought I had thrown it out years ago. I guess it was reprieved because I really liked the fabric, so couldn't bear to get rid of it. Out of curiosity, I tried it on. And it didn't look as bad as I was expecting. Although to be fair, over nine years it has come to be so hideously unappealing in my memory that anything which didn't actually cause the mirror to crack was going to look better than expected.

I still really like the fabric, and started to wonder if there was any way I could fix the dress. The material had been distinctly off grain and, instead of just living with it (hardly an issue with a floral print), I had tried, and failed, to correct it - and ended up with a very wonky garment. On top of that, the design of the skirt did me no favours. A skirt yoke may suit some people, but I am not one of them, and the gathering of the lower skirt just looked skimpy and messy.

There is nothing appealing about this look

Also, some of the gathers stuck out weirdly.

All of the centre section sticks out

On the bodice, the yoke was probably too long, but the main thing was that the pleats were all over the place.

Messy

This was hardly surprising, as the neckline turned out to be longer on one side than the other, and the pleating wasn't remotely symmetrical.

Three small on one side, two large on the other - why?

Somehow, I had even sewn in the centre tab off kilter.

The tab seam and the yoke seam do not line up

I have no idea what I thought I was doing here

There are other, smaller, issues, but I came to the conclusion that what made the dress look so bad overall was that the biggest faults are right in the centre front. So, on the basis that the worst I could do was ruin an already bad dress I didn't even know I had, I set to work.

I started with the skirt, unpicking the section of the seam which joined the yoke to the gathered lower section. Then I pressed out the gathering, and started reattaching the skirt out from the centre, but flat. Once I had attached the centre third of the skirt, I folded the excess fabric into inverted box pleats. I would have preferred a single deeper pleat in the centre, but the curved shape of the yoke made this impossible - I had to place the pleats where the yoke edge was more horizontal. It took some fiddling to get them to hang straight, but I feel it's a neater effect than the gathers.

A smooth skirt front, and the pleats line up with the bodice gathers

Encouraged by this success, I tackled the neckline. This was a lot trickier, and with hindsight I wonder if I should just have fixed the wonky tab and left well alone with the pleats. Once unpicked, they really did not want to be pleated back up in a slightly different way. But eventually, I got everything back in place. Finally, I added some shoulder pads to raise the yoke-bodice seam a little and add support to the sleeve heads.

Not great, but better

The end result is still not brilliant, and things like the uneven hem were impossible to fix without ending up with a shorter dress than I wanted. But it's a lot better than it was, and worth the effort to get it more or less wearable.

Definitely improved overall

My next 'little' job is fixing some damaged cushions from my local community café, and then I can get back to what I was meant to be doing this week - making a dress out of the 1986 toile.

Simplicity 1587, aka The Dress of Frump

Simplicity 1587 is probably the least flattering garment I have ever made. This is a bold claim, as there’s been some stiff competition over the years (late 1980s/early 1990s fashion, I’m looking at you), but still it - well my version at least - takes the biscuit.

If only

What makes this especially annoying is that it's a pattern I've wanted to make for a while. I've seen lots of great versions of it, such as this one by Kaitlyn of Simply Vintage. Esther of Dolly Creates loves it so much that she's made it five times! So when I found a poly charmeuse with a suitably retro floral print, it seemed like the perfect reason to step away from the craft cottons and try something different.

I made my standard bodice length alterations, which had worked perfectly on Simplicity 1777, and lengthened the skirt. Because the fabric was 150cm / 54" wide, I cut the skirt back as a single piece rather than have a centre back seam (the dress has a side opening). I forgot to make any alterations for shoulder pads, but I've noticed that a lot of my 1950s patterns have optional shoulder pads and no alterations to accommodate them, so decided that this wouldn't matter.

The front yoke has three pleats in each side, and getting them remotely symmetrical was a challenge. It didn't help that the fabric wasn't on the straight grain, an no amount of washing, stretching and pressing would fix this.

The pleats in progress

The bodice front and back are made up and joined at the shoulders, the skirt front and back are attached to their respective yokes, and then the bodice and skirts are put together. As with Simplicity 1777, I top-stitched the yokes in place, rather than use the modern method of placing right sides together, matching the raw edges and sewing the seam. This may not have helped.

The instructions are to sew the side seams and then set in the sleeves, but I decided to attach the sleeves first.

All made up apart from the side seams and zip

At this point, it wasn't looking promising. I hoped that it was one of those dresses which looks like a limp rag on the hanger, but fabulous when worn. So I sewed up the sides and tried it on - and it still looked like a limp rag. The front yoke lies weirdly and the pleats stick out, possibly due to the off-grain problem. There seem to be gathers in all sorts of odd and unflattering places, and the skirt yoke looks dreadful. The skirt is quite full, so there's a lot of hem, and I was tempted not to even bother. I did hem it in the end, but I can't say that I bothered too much about getting it level.

All in all it is so bad that I almost didn’t photograph the end result. Then I remembered the various discussions I've read in posts and forums over the years about the false image we all give online by only showing our successes and not our failures. So here it is in all its, ahem, 'glory'.

This is the best shot - it's downhill from here!

I think that part of the problem is that the bodice yoke should be shorter; the join to the main bodice is too low, which makes the gathered sections look peculiar.

All sorts of unflattering things going on round the bust!

Even though I lengthened the skirt pieces, there was still only enough fabric for a tiny hem.

There is so much wrong here, I can't even begin to say

Part of me really wants to redraft this and Get It Right, but part of me feels that life's too short. It's definitely one just to wear around the house. Ah well.