Sew It Dress

In 2013, I thrifted this fabric

(wow is that a warm image)  The selvedge reads "The Sew It Book Collection by The Vintage Workshop,Amy Barrickman© for RedRoostar Fabrics DSN # 19755 WWW.redroosterfabrics.com" and yes the mis-spellings and weird spacings are all there on the selvedge.

I prelaundered it in 2015, and then...  I had a vague idea to use it for a simple shirtwaist dress, but, recently, that was replaced with the idea of using it to make another peasant dress, like the recent rose dress, but not quite so much (one reason for making it a little less extravagant was that the fabric was only 40" wide.)

I had just enough paper left on the newsprint roll (that I scavenged from an attic over 20 years ago) to trace off a proper pattern front merging the skirt and bodice from Simplicity 9866.  I still need to overlay the bodice back piece on that traced piece to form the dress back, but I know that I could be lazy and make the front and back the same and it would be fine.  Probably.

So:

Rose Dress

 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 got the cloth from the craft thrift store, too.

Surprise Strawberry Shirt

 So, the lot of vintage patterns I shared in the previous post ended with Simplicity 6405 from 1974

and the note that I had found it completely lacking in charm and potential, unlike most of the other patterns in that lot.

But.

While waiting for the patterns to arrive, I prewashed some random pieces of cotton, including two I really wanted to mix together.  The yardage amount seemed to make the most sense to use for a button-up shirt with a contrast yoke.  The patterns I had on hand all had back yokes with no forward shoulder seams, so they would not be visible at all from the front.  I felt like even making the collar and front band from the contrast wouldn't be enough, both in terms of distributing the print mix, and in terms of there even being enough of the main fabric to make the entire front.

What I needed, I realized, was a vintage Western-style shaped yoke shirt pattern.  I could probably have hacked one from a yoke-less shirt pattern, but...wait...

This unappealingly earnest MISSES' PANTSUIT . . . DESIGNER FASHION...has a shaped front yoke...with just a few changes, could I make the kind of shirt I was thinking of?

Yes.

Yes I could.

Jumper Fable

 I have been taken with the idea of sewing jumpers/pinafore dresses, but apparently that's not something even remotely fashionable enough for pattern companies to offer many options now.  I do have the original print of a current Simplicity pattern that was first issued in 2004 that happens to include a simple A-line jumper in two lengths, but that wasn't the jumper silhouette I wanted to sew.  I also have a small stack of Burda dirndl patterns, but...waistline issues. (And the pattern used in the previous post did originally include a jumper, but those pieces are long gone from the envelope I thrifted.)

I do know that a lot of older dress patterns will include views that show a shirt being worn under the dress, but I didn't want to just use a dress, since the arm holes should be cut higher on a dress than on something that's meant to have another something worn under it.  Than I had the thought: Hey! I know what's meant to have another something worn under it!  A vest!

I do have several vest patterns (also things that aren't common on current pattern sites now), but I ended up back on the pattern that I had used for the vest I made late last year.  I used view B this time

...well...I started with view B.  I ended up with this

Hacking a New (to me) Pattern

...into my usual dress shape.

So, this time I started with New Look 6080 from 2011

Technically I used View C, because I included those ridiculously tiny sleeves (which I like very much), but I cut the whole thing off at waist level, then added the normal slightly A-line skirt + "oops, not quite enough cloth" shaped contrast band

It's Curtains Again

This time it's a single lace curtain panel, turned into another attempt at an under dress...that I added pockets to, because it looked cute over the clothes I was wearing when I tried it on.  If a layer might potentially be on or near the top, it needs pockets.  Why even sew if you're not gonna add pockets?

I can do that

Burda patterns were recently on sale at JoAnn.  I don't pay much attention to Burda, because they don't  go on sale often, so I had a look and Burda 6401 caught my eye.  It's a lot like the dresses I've been making, only with a gathered bell sleeve, so yes I liked it.  I was plotting my trip to JoAnn when I had a second thought about how very much like the dresses I've been making it is, especially the dresses like this that I've made by adding a gathered slightly A-line skirt to the shirt pattern from Butterick 6740.

I found a few pattern reviews for the Burda, and they all mentioned how roomy it was.  Yeah, that sealed it--I didn't need the pattern, I only needed to hack a bell sleeve for the pattern I already had.

And bell sleeves are easy to hack!