Hack it or draft it - part 2, finally complete!

My hack-it-or-draft-it challenge dress (the one which was meant to be completed in *coughs* March), is done at last!

Once I had an actual dress-shaped garment to try on, I decided to take out the front skirt pleat - it wasn't needed, and it seemed to make the skirt hang oddly. The next thing to consider was the waist ties. On the original pattern they are cut as a single layer of fabric and hemmed, but because I was using satin, I had to make them double thickness. My initial cutting layout had allowed for very long ties, and I chose to make them the full length of the fabric available, on the basis that I could shorten them later if I wanted, but I couldn't lengthen them.

This did make the ties quite heavy, and when tied they pulled down from the waist. To get round this I added a belt loop at the point where the bow is tied. Both waist ties are pulled through the loop, but despite this it only needed to be small, as the fabric compacts a lot.

The teeny tiny belt loop

The loop sewn is stitched through the dress and onto the waist stay inside. I have put waist stays into several dresses, but Gisella's comment on last week's post (and a huge thank you to her and to everyone else who takes time to comment - I do read them all) reminded me that not everyone may be familiar with this handy feature.

A waist stay or stay tape is basically a close-fitting internal fabric belt on a dress. It is usually made from petersham or grosgrain ribbon, with either a snap or hook-and-eye fasten (I prefer the latter). In effect, it acts as a waistband and provides structure to the dress; supporting full, heavy skirts such as those on Vogue 8789, and/or allowing the bodice to create a blouse effect, such as Vogue 5215. Without a waist stay, both of these dresses would just hang from shoulders and distort.

Dresses with waist stays - Vogue 8789 and Vogue 5215

The waist stay is usually only attached to the dress at the seams; sides, centre front and centre back. However, because this dress is made from such a drapey fabric, I chose to attach the stay to the waist seam allowance all the way round. Sewing the belt loop onto the stay rather than just the dress gives it more support to hold the weight of the ties. I also attached long hanging loops to the stay, to take the weight when the dress is on a hanger.

The waist stay and a hanging loop

After the amount of effort which went into this dress, I would have liked to get some decent pictures of it. Unfortunately, other commitments meant that this was not possible just now, so it was quick back yard shots instead.*

(Update, 10/05/21: The photos have been updated. Still back yard shots, but better light and better hair!)

I started off with the waist ties in a big bow, as per my inspiration image.

In a bow at the side

But then I realised that I could wrap them round my waist, and have a small tie like the one on the pattern illustration.

Centre front tie

I can't remember if I mentioned it in a previous post, but I redrafted the back pieces to make the crossover point slightly higher up.

Back view showing the wrapover

Clearly I need a longer slip, as the skirt generates static and sticks to my legs with the slightest movement, but I'm really pleased with the dress. Plus, it's more fabric out of the stash, and my first UseNine2021 project completed as well - woot!

Getting closer to stash-neutral (for this year at least)

One down, a mere eight to go!

* - In other news, I am experimenting with growing out my fringe. I've had it for over 25 years, and decided that if I wanted to grow it out, the time when it already had five months of lockdown growth was the time to try. Prepare for all manner of unfortunate hairstyles until either I give up or it gets long enough to fasten back properly!

Slow going

This pretty much sums it up

Take a more-complex-than-anticipated project, add a sewjo which has apparently decided to go on holiday without me, and top off with still not entirely fixed dominant hand and you get - not much, really.

Last week I had a top part of a dress and a skirt part of a dress, and 'all' I needed to do was join them. Doing so has left me with a new admiration of the people who design sewing patterns, and in particular the ones who work out the order of construction and write the instruction sheets so that it all makes sense. Time and again I found myself hitting the following problem:
--I couldn't do A until B was completed,
----I couldn't do B until C was completed, and
------I couldn't do C until A was completed.

For example, I can't decide on the waist tie lengths until I see how they look on the completed dress, and I can't complete the dress without including the waist ties.

Waist tie options - long or short?

There was also the problem that I had decided to omit the bound buttonhole which the tie comes through, and replace it with an opening in the side seam. Then I realised that this left the bodice back unattached to anything. I didn't think that a couple of stitches to secure it would be strong enough, so ended up joining the two sides with a short length of narrow tape, attached to the seam allowances to make it invisible.

The new opening for the waist tie

I am at least pleased that the way the skirt fastens worked out as planned.

The dress unfastened

Step 1 - fasten the waist stay

Step 2 - pull the tie through the opening

Step 3 - do up the zip

Part of the reason why this dress has taken so long is that early on I formed the suspicion that it wouldn't work, so eagerly grabbed any excuse to work on something else. When I tried it on, I was pleasantly surprised by the fit and general appearance, but somehow I'm still struggling to get myself into my workroom and crack on with it. I just keep telling myself that the end is now in sight!

Hack it or draft it - part 1, research and planning

Q. What do you do after you have finished a dress which gave you all sorts of problems with its construction because you chose to use a really awkward fabric?

A. Obviously, you start another dress in much the same fabric!

This quarter's challenge for the Sew A Vintage Style Dress Community is 'Hack It or Draft It' - either draft your own pattern, or take an existing one and alter it. I'm doing a bit of both, converting the blouse of Vintage Vogue pattern 2859 (now out of print) into a dress. And I'm going to use one of my #UseNine2021 fabrics for it; the very slippery, very drapey, teal satin. What could possibly go wrong?!

Vintage Vogue 2859, the blouse

I made this in 2014. I've still got it, and I still like it, but I never wear it because it is so short and rides up. Judging from the images I found when I googled the pattern number, several people dealt with this issue by adding length to the blouse below the waist tie.

Note the gaps between bouse and skirt

On closer inspection of the pattern envelope illustrations, it's apparent that it was intended to be worn over the dress, not as a standalone blouse.

The black 'skirt' is actually the slip dress

The blouse has darts at the front, a wrapover back, and ties at the front. The right back goes under the left, with the tie going through a bound buttonhole.

Blouse front and back

I have decided that I don't want to just extend the top to dress length and rely on the ties to shape it, instead my plan is to make a darted skirt attached to the front and the right back, with a side fastening on the left (not my preferred option for side opening, but necessary this time) and a waist stay to hold it in place. The left back will still wrap over, and tie at the front.

Cue dropping down the rabbit hole of research. At this point I should stress that my intention is to make a '1930s-inspired' dress from the pattern, rather than something strictly period accurate, so I have a lot more freedom to pick and choose design elements. CoPA has a good selection of 1935 dress patterns, which were my starting point, plus I have a couple of 1930s copies of Vogue Pattern Book. One feature which I liked was skirts with a centre front panel rather than a centre seam.

Vogue dress patterns featuring centre panel skirts

Some styles have flared skirts, like this Butterick pattern in my collection, while others are straight with pleats at the bottom. Some only have one front pleat (or even, only one front seam) to give a faux wrap effect - these usually have a further pleat at the centre back.

Butterick 7598, 1937

McCall 8350, 1935, from Etsy

I've decided to go for a hybrid approach, with two seams, but only one front pleat. The seams will (I hope!) line up with the centre one of the three pleats on the bodice. Then, while looking through "1930s Fashion: The Definitive Sourcebook" by Charlotte Fiell and Emmanuelle Dirix (currently out of print, but possibly due to be reissued later this year), I found this illustration.

La Mode Illustrée, 1932

I really like the idea of the offset, rather than central, tie.

Design decided upon, it was time to create the pattern. The only change I've made to the Vogue blouse is altering the back piece so that it comes all the way across to the side seam. The skirt is based on my standard skirt pattern, lengthened, widened to give a hem circumference similar to that of Vogue 8686, and with the front split into panels. I need one side panel with a vent, one side panel without a vent, and a centre piece with a vent on one side only (which means that it can't be cut out on the fold, but needs a complete pattern piece).

The fabric I'm using is a remnant, and finding a way to fit all the pieces onto the material available stretched even my pattern tetris skills to the very limit! It doesn't help that the bodice pieces are really odd shapes. In the end, I had to make rough scale drawings of all the pattern pieces and play around with different placements.

My cutting layout creation method

As usual when fabric is limited, it all had to be cut from a single layer of fabric. The fabric selvedges were very tightly woven, causing the satin to pucker, so I had to snip into them to get it to lie flat. Of course, this slightly reduced the width available to work with. I cut the bodice pieces first, on the basis that I could shorten the skirt if necessary, but couldn't really shorten the bodice if I ran out of cloth!

Cutting out the first bodice pieces

I had to check, double-check and triple-check that I had all the different-shaped skirt pieces laid out the right way round before I cut them out. Even with all my planning, I was hugely relieved to discovered that my layout worked, and all the pieces fitted on the fabric. The ties will be cut out later, once I know how the dress hangs together and what dimensions they need to be.

Simply cutting out the nine pattern pieces took a long time, and really emphasized how tricky this fabric is to work with. I must admit that I'm beginning to have very grave doubts about the chances of this project being a success, but there's only one way to find out . . .

Pink pics!

Well, in an attempt to record the true colour of my 1930s pink blouse, and to prove that it isn't really a glow-in-the-dark pink, I've grappled with the self-timer on the camera to take some non-flash photographs. And here they are. (Apologies for the waistband-less and very un-1930s skirt, I didn't have anything more appropriate to hand at the time.)

Front view

Back view. Clearly I need to improve my posture!

In the Great Outdoors

Pink

After last week's trauma, the fate of Vogue 2859 hung in the balance/over the bin for a couple of days, as I tried to decide whether a) my brain could be sufficiently un-fried to make sense of the pattern instructions, and b) the project was worth any more of my limited time.

In the end, curiosity got the better of me. I wanted to know just how those weirdly shaped pieces came together, and especially, how the twisted scarf section at the front neck was done.

As with the 1930s dress and peplum for the 'Green' challenge, tacking the different pattern markings; small circle, large circle, triangle and square, in different colours was a massive help when trying to join various bits together.

Most of the photographs I took along the way don't really make things any clearer, so here's the blouse front piece, and an explanation of the first few steps of the construction instead.

Piece for blouse front, sleeve and scarf

The centre front/scarf section is reinforced with a scrap of silk organza. To my mind the instructions for this are a bit sketchy, so I was relieved that it was a technique I used previously, on the sleeve gussets of the Vegas Night dress.

The 'shoulder seam' is actually a dart.

The pattern information describes the sleeves as 'kimono at front and raglan at back'. The back piece joins to the front along the top edge, and the back sections overlap each other.

There are a few tricky joins, and a lot of narrows hems sewn on bias edges. In the end I did the main seams by machine, but for anything complex went with what has become my mantra since starting the Historical Sew Fortnightly challenges: if in doubt, sew it by hand!

The scarf particularly intrigued me, so here it is, step by step.

On the right scarf, turn in the lower edge by 1.5cm / ⅝", baste and trim. Sew a narrow hem at the end.

Right scarf, showing organza reinforcement

On the left scarf, turn in the upper edge by 1.5cm / ⅝", baste and trim. Sew a narrow hem at the end.

Left scarf

Pin the unfinished edges together, right sides together, and stitch. Do not press the seam open. I did so initially, but then discovered that it did the finished look no favours whatsoever, so had to turn the finished scarf inside out to press the seam flat again.

Raw edges placed together

Slipstitch the basted edges together, wrong sides together.

Ready to slipstitch the basted edges, wrong side

The end result should be a twisted fabric tube.

The completed scarf, right side

The ties are attached to the ends of the back pieces. Because I had shortened the pattern along the alteration mark at the bottom of the front and back pieces, the tie was much wider than the piece it was to be sewn to, so I had to pleat it slightly. There is a fabric bound buttonhole near the side seam in the left back piece, through which the right tie passes.

So here is the completed blouse.

Front view

Side view

Close-up of shoulder, showing dart, back seam and scarf

Back view

What the flash photography doesn't show is that the fabric is thinner than I had realised, and so the blouse will need something underneath to keep it decent. The perfect excuse to make a 1930s camisole! And the 'Bodice' challenge is coming up!

Another problem is that I made my usual adjustment to a Vogue pattern, shortening it by 5cm / 2". However what I hadn't taken into account is that there is no skirt to add weight and pull the waistline down a bit. If I make this again, I will make it slightly longer.

On the plus side, I took the Dreamstress' advice about reissued vintage patterns, and made it up a size smaller than I would usually use. Apart from the length, the result is a perfect fit. Thanks Leimomi!

The small print:
The Challenge: Pink.
Fabric: Washed satin fabric of unknown but man-made composition (my local fabric shop isn't too good on labelling!)
Pattern: Vintage Vogue 2859.
Year: 1935
Notions: Thread
How historically accurate is it? The pattern is a re-issue of a Vogue 1930s design, construction is accurate for the period, and synthetic fabric was a possibility by that date, so about 80%.
Hours to complete: About 10 (way too much of which was spent trying to decipher the instructions).
First worn: Not yet. However I will have to wear it outdoors, and take pictures, so I can post some accurate images of the colour.
Total cost: Fabric £3.89, thread £1.60, pattern from stash, so £5.49.

Move along now please, nothing to see here

For the first time, I find myself blogging about the fact that I've got nothing to blog about!

The current Historical Sew Fortnightly challenge is Pink. This is the third challenge of the year, but the first one that I've attempted ('attempted' being the key word here). I've been very lax about posting links to the previous challenges: you can see the entries for Challenge 1, Make Do & Mend, here and here; while the entries for Challenge 2, Innovation, are here and here.

So, back to Pink. This is a challenge in itself, as pink is not a colour I wear very often. But after the fitting saga that was Vogue 8686 I wanted to make up another Vintage Vogue pattern, and try out The Dreamstress' suggestion of making it in a smaller size than normal. So, making the blouse from Vogue 2859 seemed like a quick project (ha!), and an easy (double ha!) way of easing myself back into HSF sewing.

Vogue 2859 blouse detail, front and back

I bought a fine washed satin in a pretty coral colour (it's nothing like the vibrant pink in the photograph below, blame the flash on my camera for that), shortened the pattern, and set to work. The first sign that all was not well came before I had even laid on a pattern piece. The fabric length was cut on the straight grain at one end, but cut very squint indeed on the other, so I tore it to get the straight grain at both ends. The piece I tore off is at folded at the bottom left of the picture below, so you can see just how squint it was.

When I folded the fabric in half, I discovered that one side was longer than other! The selvedges were a bit puckered, so I snipped into them to loosen any tightness in the weaving, but to no avail. Then I cut off selvedges altogether and removed any odd odd warp threads, so the piece was exactly straight on all four sides. Despite this, it was still 1.3m long on one side and 1.34m long on the other. Very odd.

Instead of taking this as an Awful Warning, I carried on. The pattern only has four pieces; front, back, two long rectangles for the tie belt and a small buttonhole facing. There are no other facings. As with Vogue 8686 however, there are some very strange shapes.

Blouse front (top), back (bottom right), and torn-off fabric

Well, I don't know if I'm having a particularly dense weekend, but this pattern seems to be entirely beyond me. The instructions don't make sense, and the pattern illustrations bear no resemblance to the part-made garment in front of me. So I'm putting down my scissors and stepping away from the worktable for a bit.

However, as one picture of garish pink fabric does not a decent blog post make, here are some pictures of various dresses (well, mostly dresses) in various shades of pink that I have seen in my travels.

1830s cotton dress, Snibston Discovery Museum

Unfinished 1860s day dress, Fashion Museum, Bath

!908 silk day dress, Macclesfield Silk Museum

1920s dress, Alexandre Vassiliev Collection

1920s dress (detail), Alexandre Vassiliev Collection

1920s dress, Fashion Museum, Bath

1937 Schiaparelli evening coat (detail), Victoria and Albert Museum

1942 dress, Snibston Discovery Museum

1950s evening dress, Fashion Museum, Bath

Mid 1950s Horrockses cotton dress

Horrockses housecoats

Late 1940s Horrockses cotton sunsuit

Late 1940s Horrockses cotton sunsuit

1960s Fortnum and Mason evening dress, Fashion Museum, Bath

1960s Hardy Amies evening dress, Fashion Museum, Bath

Shoes, Fashion Museum, Bath