YWUDPP

My plans for entering the Your Wardrobe Unlock'd Single Pattern Project fell apart at the seams (no pun intended). Other things took over my spare time and when I only had two months until the deadline I found I had an exam to study for so I did that instead.

I didn't enter the competition and I didn't win.

This year it's going to be different on three grounds:

1) the project won't be based on a single pattern, it will be based on a time period*
2) the deadline for entries will be extended by five, yes five, months
3) there's a good chance I won't have to spend my Summer studying for an exam

So, this is the deal. Readers submit proposals for time periods. Readers vote for the time period they want to study. There will be two time periods selected for the competition: one in the Victorian era, one not (this is due to the majority of readers liking the Victorian era best so any poll is likely to end up electing a Victorian era leaving the rest of us fed up with studying the Victorian era… again). Readers make something based on styles from one (or maybe both if they are that way inclined) of the time periods.

The deadline for submission of proposals of time periods is this weekend. I haven't submitted one because my unhelpful argument would be "Because the clothes were all so pretty!" and the periods I would be happy to cover are almost all of them since the 1300s.

So far the proposals are 1630s, 1690s and 1869-1873. I'm sure I would enjoy either of the first two.


* this doesn't bear any relation to my ability to complete something to enter into the competition - this is just a thing that will be different this year

Good News!

My sewing machine is better now. It turns out that it wasn't a case of it getting on a bit and something going wrong, it was just in a bad mood. It doesn't like chiffon, you see. Which is fair enough - no-one likes chiffon unless it is already in dress form. When it's just a bunch of fabric, wobbling all over the place and falling off the table it makes people cross. Unfortunately, getting it from wobble-wobble-fall-off-table to floaty-floaty-skippy-dress involves getting it to behave itself which I have tried to do by utilising tissue paper and only cutting it in straight lines. I'm going to try out things like liquid stabiliser which not only will (hopefully) make it behave better under my sewing machine foot but also enable me to cut out shapes from it that are not rectangular.

I'm still going to get the machine serviced, however, as it is long overdue for one and has a squeak.

The Inevitable has Happened

It is the time I was not lookng forward to. I knew, when I bought my sewing machine, that one day something would go wrong with it. Something that I wouldn't be able to fix myself. That something has happened.

It started on Friday when my top thread kept breaking. It has done this before but it's either a rare event or I've done something wrong. I put everything back to how it was before, changed the needle, re-threaded, cleaned the lint away, changed the thread, changed the fabric. My instruction manual suggested the thread tension was wrong which would be surprising as I hadn't changed it. I tried this to solve the problem anyway and although it helped a bit, I still got the breakage. I moved the tension back to original place and now my tension is all wrong.

I feel sad.

I will call Franklin's in the week and see if they'll prod it for me.

Pattern Adjustments

Your Wardrobe Unlock'd has been preparing its readers for its single pattern project competition. In January's issue it talked about underpinnings. In February's issue it talked about scaling up and altering the pattern. What was particularly interesting was that it showed me how to drape a pattern onto a dressform. Hooray! Although I won't be using that method here (I feel more comfortable playing with flat bits of paper and maths) it's a method I want to try out when I make my 18th century dress (more about that later) and have made my identical twin (which is proving more tricky than I originally thought and may need a different approach).

So I spent yesterday evening enlarging the relevant patterns and then trying to figure out whether, how much and how I needed to alter them to fit me.

I enlarged the pattern pieces from my A4 sized pdf printout using some inch squared paper, some tracing paper and drawing the pieces by sight using the grids as guides. I am intending to use the bolero pattern and the skirt pattern for my final concoction but as the skirt is HUGE and the pattern consists of two pieces - one of which is a rectangle and the other a trapezium with a wibbly edge - I decided not to try enlarging the skirt pattern as that can just as easily be drawn straight onto the fabric and so won't require acres of paper.

I was a little disappointed that after scaling up the bolero pattern and measuring it, I didn't need to make much in the way of adjustments*. The sleeve needed to be lengthened and possibly narrowed but the bust was only slightly larger than mine. Or at least the width where my bust would be if I wore the jacket was only slightly larger than mine. It seems likely that if I were to lengthen the pattern in the chest (which in all probability I'm meant to do) then I would need to measure the bust at a different point which may yield a bigger number. It's being very difficult to tell but will no doubt reveal itself when I make a mock up.

As I wanted to get stuck in to the whole pattern adjustment thing I went and scaled up the pattern for the evening bodice too. I marked on the bust and waist lines and then went to bed.

Another exciting installment of pattern adjusting will follow (hopefully with pictures)!


* I am in the process of making a dress from a Vogue pattern and it has been a nightmare to get it to fit. This also means that I've got caught up in a pattern adjusting mood.

Clickity-Clack Clickity-Clack Choo-Choo!

My main problem with interpreting the Your Wardrobe Unlock'd big dress pattern was that I don't get excited enough about cage crinolines to actually wear one. While pondering on how to get around this, I came across this post on A Dress A Day. It was not the actual subject matter of the post but the picture used to illustrate it that caught my attention. That was it! Don't like the huge skirt? Stick it 'round the back!

So my idea is that I will use the skirt pattern but put all the pleats at the back and have it as a sort of long pencil skirt in the front. So then I'll have a sort of train thing which, to stop it getting in the way of people, I can hoist up with the use of pulleys and gears and things* (then when I'm in a large empty room I can let it down and run around).

I love trains but they're just so impractical.

It then occurred to me that maybe I should make the skirt and train separate so I don't have to wear them together if I don't want to.

Also, I will be making the bolero which in terms of learning from this project is the important bit as it will cover fitting, sleeves, fitting sleeves and hopefully fitting lining to the sleeves. I may change its neckline, though.

I'll be making a corset with separate cups and hip gores too that can be worn under or over the skirt and train (incidentally, it has been announced that there will be a separate competition for the best corset to go with the project).

So nothing will be historically accurate.


* OK then, cords. I would like to have some contraption with cogs to lever it up but that would just make the train even more cumbersome and defeat the object.

1929 Evening Gown with Handkerchief Points

The Ingredients

I bought myself some drapey fabric, some thread to go with it and some white cotton poplin (the poplin isn't for the evening dress - now that Winter was drawing in John Lewis went and got a shed load of the nice summery stuff so I went ahead and stocked up). I was intending to make a mock up to ensure fit before I went ahead and did the real thing so my fabric is only polyester. But it's still lovely. And I wouldn't have had time to do a mock up too so I went ahead and ploughed straight into the real thing.

The Pattern

I traced the pattern onto tracing paper and made an adjustment to allow for the fact that I'm a bit tall. It was quite difficult to judge how much extra I needed as I didn't know exactly where the shoulder seam would sit when I eventually had the dress on and trying to measure myself down my back was never going to be easy. I plumped for two inches and crossed my fingers (and held my thumbs).

The Cutting Out

This took a long time to do. The fabric (charmeuse) is quite wobbly and requires lots of gentle prodding to get it to line up straight. Then one wrong move whilst pinning and it all wobbles out of line again. I'm wondering if there isn't a lot to be said for a rotary cutter and weights.

Thankfully, the pattern pieces are full of straight lines and often rectangular making the actual cutting out a lot easier than it could have been. I did, however, make a bit of a mistake here which didn't show itself until way into the sewing process but I will tell you more about that later.

The Sewing Together

The instructions with which the pattern came have been transcribed from the original 1920s pattern and are fairly basic but with help from the contest winner I was able to piece it together without too much head scratching. The numerous straight edges called out to me "French seams!" so that's what I did and here's how I did them:

- mark half the seam allowance on the right side
- mark the full seam allowance on the wrong side
- stitch the pieces wrong sides together
- press the seams, fold them over and stitch the pieces right sides together along the actual seam allowance
- then do some more pressing

All of this involves a lot of pinning and tacking and trimming and un-picking and ironing (particularly as I was dealing with wobbly fabric) so you can imagine my dismay when I discovered that one of my side pieces was too big along the top (that's the cutting out error I made) and removing the piece and inserting a right sized piece would mean unpicking a lot of seams and re-doing them all. I will use the excuse of time constraints to explain why I didn't do this and instead I fudged it by putting a tuck in it instead. This means the piece doesn't quite hang right but no-one can see because it's obscured by another bit of dress.

Some pinning and tacking:

The Hemming

I was going to finish my edges by applying bias binding but to ensure the drape wasn't affected I was going to make my own out of the same fabric instead of using some stiff shop bought stuff. I measured all those handkerchief points and found I would need eleven metres and so I began measuring out the fabric. Wobbly fabric on the bias = very wobbly fabric. It wasn't long before I could feel myself going mad so I decided to just use the binding for the neck and armhole edge and try a rolled hem for the handkerchief points.

This is the first time I have ever done a rolled hem and while it's not the most exciting thing to do, it's certainly easy enough if you've got a cold and can't really be doing with getting up and down to the sewing machine and moving about a lot. So I just sat still for a bit and sewed. And sewed and sewed and sewed. I seem to remember posting something earlier about long circle skirts having a lot of hem. So do skirts with six handkerchief points.

Here's my rolled hem:

The Girdle

The girdle is meant to fasten at the front with a buckle. I'm not sure I fancy the idea of that and maybe one day I will post about my views on fastenings but for the time being I decided to try adding a bit of extra fabric and fastening it with a knot. So that's what I did.

The Weight Strap

I took a small US coin (maybe a nickel, I can't remember), cleaned it and stuck it in a pocket at the front of the cowl neck. This is to stop the neckline from flopping out of the front of the dress whenever it takes a fancy to it. I got the coin idea from the competition winner.

The Fit

When I put the dress on it seemed to fit. At least reasonably well. I feel as though the top bit should be slightly narrower (I used the smallest pattern size which strictly speaking was still an inch to wide for me) although this may result in an inability to actually get the dress on. My two inch lengthening judgement seems to be about right as it certainly doesn't look ridiculously long but I think maybe only one and a half inches would have been better. Judging from the compliments I kept getting, it obviously didn't look like it was ill fitting anyway.

Here is the front:


And here is the back:


What I Learned

- rolled hems
- how to reinforce slash points
- that I need to take more care when cutting out

Things that make me proud of myself

After doing a bit more sewing I can actually see an improvement in the quality of the things I make. I feel as though I have gone from cobbling some fabric together to form something that resembles a dress (but don't look too closely at the seams or on the inside or at the stitching) to actually being able to make a proper dress. This feeling has been given extra strength after my company Christmas party the other night.

There is a website called Pattern Review and the whole idea is that people make things from patterns and then upload reviews of the pattern. The website also holds competitions one of which, back in May, was a vintage sewing competition. I paid little attention to this until I received a newsletter announcing the winner.

This was the winning dress (the (very helpful) review is here but you need to be a Pattern Review member to read it).

And this is the pattern it was made from.

I bought the pattern and hugged it a lot. Then for the Christmas party I made it up and wore it and got a lot of compliments. And I don't mean "I like your dress" from people who knew I had made it (although I did get those too), I mean "Stunning" and "There should be a prize for best dress" from people who don't even know I sew.

So I am feeling mightily proud of myself at the moment and it's all been down to practice. There isn't anything specific that I feel I'm doing better, I just seem to be coming up with better results.

Over the weekend I will try to sort out the various pictures I took of the dressmaking process so I can show them to you.