About a month ago, a friend shared a link to a website with scans of Otome no Sewing, a Japanese sewing publication with sewing patterns for otome kei and lolita clothes. Lolita style is fairly well known; otome is a predecessor to lolita, from the 1970s and not without notes of Gunne Sax.
Otome no Sewing Book 13 featured a fairly simple dress, a well-established shape with elastic at the neckline and waist for shaping.
For whatever reason, it really caught my eye. The actual Otome no Sewing mooks include full-size patterns, but the directions include illustrations with so many measurements that you could draft patterns from them. And I thought about doing that!
The idea percolated in the back of my mind long enough to realize that Simplicity 9866 from 1980, which was a pattern I'd grabbed in October during my last visit to the craft re-use thrift store and then wondered what potential I'd seen in it at all, would be really easy to hack into the right shapes
The changes I made were pretty basic: omit the yoke, move the top of the skirt up to the level of the bottom of the armscye, eke out as much width of a bottom ruffle as possible, and make and apply bias tape all over the place to be elastic casings. And add lace.
I deviated from the Otome no Sewing dress by making the bodice area wider, but making the lowest edge of the skirt narrower--the Otome no Sewing dress would have been about 24" wider where the ruffle attaches, which meant it would not have fit on regular 45" width fabric. Otome no Sewing solved this by cutting the dress pieces cross grain. With each side in a different direction. Yeah, no.
Also, the distance from the waist elastic to the edge where the ruffle attaches in the magazine was about 18"; even when I slid the skirt piece all the way up to the armpit, it still ended up several inches longer than that. I went ahead and cut it at the length of the pattern. I don't mind the overall length the dress ended up, but, if I had cut it at 18", I would have had enough fabric left to make the ruffle four times the width of the lower edge of the main part of the dress--which is what the Otome no Sewing dress has--instead of the 3 times it is.
I dug some green cotton-maybe-poly-blend out of the small yardage stash to make into 1" single fold bias tape for the elastic channels.
Digging into my trim stash showed me that I didn't have enough of the black cluny I wanted to use, but I did have a narrower version of it to mix in. The narrow is at the neckline and the sleeves and hem have the (somewhat) wider version.
To place the elastic on the sleeves and waistline, I used the bodice piece on the original pattern to mark (with tailor's chalk) the waistline on the inside of the main dress piece, and a ruler to mark it inside the sleeves. If there are irregularities, they're well hidden by the gathering and print.
I used the ruffling foot to gather the ruffle and managed to get it exactly the right amount of gathering on the first try, which is always nice.
Oh, the Otome no Sewing pattern also has the front and back pieces exactly the same size, so using a proper pattern means they're not the same, which makes me feel better.
Again, I know this is a very basic concept for a dress, and is not original to Otome no Sewing (the original parts of their version are all the bows I left off), but seeing it in the scans is what prompted me to try making this kind of dress for the first time, and, in the name of quick breezy summer dresses, I will probably make more. I will probably also make the skirt part the 18" length, or the same length but omit the ruffle, and angle the upper part of the dress so the top isn't quite as wide. The lace trim will be optional, and I may try at least one without the waist elastic. (related, I may also try a similar hack to merge the skirt to the bodice in Simplicity 9153--would it be the ultimate low effort loose hot summer day dress? Only way to know is to try it...)
Oh, and, in the future, I hope have enough fabric to--and to remember to--add pockets.
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