I had picked three (actually four) fabrics to use for my first try at making a Gunne Sax dress, cut everything out, then realized I didn't want to use the polyester-heavy rose print fabric with the other prints, so I found another fabric to coordinate with that and made a different dress than I'd originally intended.
That did leave me with all of the other fabrics cut out and ready to go, so I poked and prodded my stash until it coughed up another fabric that would be suitable for this pattern and coordinate with the other two print fabrics. (The fourth fabric is a solid, used in areas that aren't meant to be seen.) I settled on what was left of the pink kettle cloth, left over from a long skirt I made last year.
I knew the remains of the kettle cloth probably wouldn't be enough to make the peplum, and I was fine with that. It turned out, though, that there also wasn't enough to cut the full sleeves, which turned out better than fine, because I had had a growing ambivalence about making a long sleeved dress from such bright and summery colors. Short sleeves easily rectified that!
The hem volume is ridiculous, and that's with making it about a yard less because I was, originally, working with only the cluny lace I had, and my largest, widest piece was only 4½ yards, while the pattern wanted 5 3/8 yards. Of course I didn't let that stop me.
Every other piece of lace and trim used on this dress was new, purchased, if not for this specific dress, then still acquired with the spirit of trimming future Gunne Sax style dresses. The dress I originally thought I was going to make, with the beige and rose print and only trims I had, obviously never actually happened.
There is some slight incongruence in the fact that the laces are all white, but the twill tape I got for lacing is ivory. I don't think the difference is terrible, but I do acknowledge it. I'm also still not keen on the way the lacing is done through cluny lace, either—it's supposed to be regular ol' decorative cluny lace, but I got some very small all triangle cluny, so the lacing ends up much denser than intended. That's fine! I might try actual metal eyelets/grommets when I move away toward dresses that are more inspired by Gunne Sax than that are trying to follow an actual licensed pattern.
I was able to move the bodice (and corresponding skirt) side seams to a more centered position...and then, when that was fixed, I became aware of how very narrow the shoulders are. I was aware that they were narrow, and I thought I was making an intentional decision to leave them that way. But. My shoulders are snug against the centers of the puffy sleeves.
I have gone back already and added some width to the armscyes, so the next attempt should be better. And this one isn't unwearable! It's just not optimal.
Honestly, though, I'm considering ways I might make a variation of my standby Fake Burda 6401/Mock McCall's 8197 into something resembling this dress. It would be as much for the great fit of the shoulders (and also my preference for bell sleeves over gathered sleeves) as it would be for the popover aspect. I don't have any problems with the process of installing zippers—
—look at how well things align in the back—
—I'm just lazy about them. Oh, sure, I'll happily spend hours sewing on appliqués or trim, or sewing together patchwork, but, ten minutes for a zipper? Boring.
I did try making belt loops to hold the back bow in place. They work well enough.
This pattern has pockets included, and the sides are drafted with a small extension to sew the pocket bags to, which is my favorite way to approach side seam pockets, because it means the pocket bag seams are offset from the side seams, so there's no need to get everything perfectly aligned where it all intersects. (When I'm sewing pocket bags without that extension, I use a 3/8" seam allowance, to achieve a similar offset.) The pockets are cut from plain beige poly cotton, chosen when I thought there was going to be a whole lot more beige in the project.
I also used it for the lowest layer's underskirt, where it does make a reasonable match to the base color in the monochrome print on the bottom ruffle.
The pattern calls for 1¾" lace sewn atop the hem of the lowest tier of the upper skirt. The lace I'd scrounged when originally planning this project was 1¼", and, as mentioned earlier, I didn't have as much as the pattern wanted, so I cut the bottom tier to fit the amount of lace. The dress did not suffer from this concession.
That underskirt ruffle likes to fold itself up and look uneven, but, really, it's fine.
Overall, this dress is fun to make, but it has features that just seem odd to me. That's part of why I don't regret leaving off the peplum—they just seem weird. As does the skirt being A-line, which might make more sense if the peplum were in place, although my research has seen a lot of Gunne Sax dresses with A-line skirts and no peplums. I initially thought the visible facings were odd, but, once I decided to add interfacing (even though the pattern has no mention of interfacing), I came around to them, along with the bias tape neckline finish.
I will say, when it got to the point that the dress was ready for the lower tiers and underskirt, and looked like this:
Well. A lot of minidresses in the early 70s had this kind of overall look, so I might abandon most of the Gunne Sax aspects and try a variation that is just this (only a bit longer.) Even more so if I can rig it up so it doesn't need the zipper.
I did want to say: I probably could have rigged up something on my own, without having the actual Gunne Sax pattern, but I quickly realized, while copying parts to modify, that, on my own, I would have made so many things so much bigger, just because I generally tend toward extravagance, and that wouldn't have looked right. This pattern does benefit from what seems to me like restraint, if only because I can't imagine how enormous that lower tier would have ended up being if it had been left entirely up to me...
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