Why I haven't Finished

I had to shelve all my projects due to very catastrophic life changes.

Du Barry 5766 - Done! Ta Daa!

I almost had this completed by the deadline (last night), but was just too tired to try to finish.  I hemmed and sewed buttons this morning.  I'll post a pic of me wearing it later this week.

This was a fun project.  I REALLY like the dress, and I think I will really enjoy wearing it this spring and summer.  It fits well (IMO) and feels comfortable.  The fabric is just the right drape.  I have more vintage patterns from this era.  I need to dig them out and start working on them.

I still have a more detailed post on my blog. 

Du Barry 5766 - Finally Underway

Still being "iced in" today, I pulled out the vintage dress (that had been cut out for a week or more) to begin work.  The color in the photo (at least on my monitor) does not reflect the true color.  The color is a nice teal.  It's showing blue on my monitor.  At this point, one side seam is sewn and one is pinned.  When I sew the other side seam, I'll try on and see where the tweeks need to be.  The fabric feels like a  linen blend.  It sews well and feels nice.  I think the fabric drape will work well for this pattern.  Stay tuned!

pattern work Butterick 4627 coat

This weekend I worked on pattern alterations to Butterick 4627 coat.

First, I traced it onto Swedish tracing paper.  Then I carefully folded the pattern and stored it.  It's so fragile, I don't want to damage it.

I know what the fit issues will be, so I like to make flat pattern adjustments before sewing a muslin.  I used a TNT pattern (McCall's 5145) and compared the dimensions. I generally need to add height to the shoulder /armscye area and adjust the sleeve head.

The way I compare 2 very different armscyes is to mark the vertical center front and center back lines and horizontal lines at the bottom of the armscye as reference points. (See the green lines in the photo) Then I overlap my current project over the TNT pattern, aligning center front /back & armscye lines.  This is the easiest way I've found to get the alteration done without pulling my hair out.  Sewing something straight out of the envelope generally produces something so mysteriously unwearable that I have been known to ball it up, toss it in a trashcan and head to the mall.

This Butterick 4627 is a size 10, which I like because that shoulder length matches mine.  I would wear a size 20 if I used the usual bust-hips-waist to determine my size.

If you click on the image, you can see it larger:

The darts are pinned out in the bust area of both patterns.

After getting the shoulders, neckline and armscye altered, I went on to grade the pattern up at the waist and hips.

I just calculated the amount of ease in the size 10, and added the same amount to my own measurements.  I added some  to the the side seams, and the rest to the vertical wedges created by slashing & spreading down the middle of each front and each back piece.  

At this point, I've pinned the altered front and back on my dress form and it's looking about right.  Now I need to alter the sleeves.  I won't sew a muslin of the entire coat - it is just too much fabric!  But I will sew a partial muslin from the bust up.  I need to make sure all my little calculations and adjustments work properly.

I am not sure what has possessed me to sew another coat so soon.  They are so big and bulky and generally annoying to handle.  But, alas, my desire for this coat outweighs the inconvenience.

I must have it!

Muslin Take Two-- and Some Advice Needed

You may remember this picture that I posted last week when I realized that I needed to add some major length to the bodice.  (Imagine-- at first I thought it was supposed to look that way!)

I went back to the drawing board and added 2" to the pattern.  While some of you advocated not changing it at all since it didn't look bad per se, I think the second muslin is much better as the proportion seems more correct in this second one.  Another reason I wanted to lower the waist is that I do want to include the belt-- so the natural waist needs to actually sit at the waist, not at my ribcage.

A few sidenotes:

• These are NOT the shoulder pads I intend to use.  I wanted to use shoulder pads for the fitting since the pattern calls for them and I definitely want to use them.  (They're supposed to extend into the sleeve cap).  I will most likely make my own from batting when I get to that point in the process.  I have a few forties dresses in my closet that I can use for reference.
• When I was a design student in college, I did an independent study with one of my professors where we focused on fit.  One great trick I learned is to tie a piece of elastic around your waist (the black line above in photo).  Jump around a bit/wiggle/move and the elastic will naturally settle into the smallest part of your waist.  THIS is your natural waist.  Compare this with where your pattern has the waistline marked (also visible on the muslin in the middle photo above) and adjust accordingly.
• I also lowered the armhole about 1".  It felt a little tight, and there were wrinkles forming along the side seam.  According to Vogue Fitting (a wonderful resource that you can buy used on Amazon for as little as $2.00), the underarm seam should start about 1" below the armpit.
• I'm ready to move on to the fashion fabric.  Woohoo!

So, I need y'alls expertise on something:

This dress has an opening in the side seam to allow for me to put it on (see picture below).  The original pattern calls for snaps, but I don't really know how one makes a placket (for lack of a better word) for snaps in a side seam.  Does anyone have any experience doing this?

My mom suggested using an invisible zipper instead which is fine except I don't think I like zippers in side seams.  In my recollection, they tend to buckle strangely which ruins the silhouette of the dress.  I have a suspicion that gals with a lower waist-hip ratio can use a zipper there, whereas girls like me with tiny waists and larger hips run into trouble.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Update - Sidetracked

Hello Ladies (and possibly gents)! First I want to thank you for all the help on my fitting issues. I have to say that after doing three muslins I got tired of looking at the project. It wasn't until I realized I was going to skip doing "the little details" that I want to make this a special project that I decided I needed a break. Instead I'm making some vintage clothing for my little girl. If anyone is interested I'll post pictures of that when I'm done!

I'll be back in the saddle and on my way before February is half over. Cheers!

(In the meantime, I've been up to other things too.)

My Pattern Choice from Territory Mom

First, let me tell you how excited and privileged I am to be a part of this sewalong.  I feel like I have my own personal home ec teacher.

This pattern comes from a pattern book distributed by the American Thread Company and published in 1945.  I didn't want to take up too much room so you can read more about my choice here.

Anyway, I'm Territory Mom and I have three blogs, too many, I know.  OklaHome is my first blog about Oklahoma, of course and my family history.  Delayed But Not Denied is about being a mom and raising a sensational son (we have the big "A") and his wonderful sister.  New Territory Co. is my sewing and business blog.

I know this is the Great Vintage Sewalong but to me it is a great escape.

Thanks for letting me be a part of it.

Have a great day and happy sewing.

Love,

Territory Mom

Du Barry 5766 - Ready to Cut Fashion Fabric

I think I'm officially ready to cut into the "real" fabric.  I have worked on the sleeve that I.just.could.not.ease into the armhole WITHOUT gathers or puckers.

The pattern at the top of the photo is the revised pattern; the pattern at the bottom of the photo is the original pattern showing some of the manipulation used to get to the new pattern.  More details at my blog Seams Well.

Dunderhead!

Is there an official name for the sudden dementia that strikes as soon as one starts a sewing project?  I swear-- Every.Single.Time I sit down to sew, I end up making silly, silly mistakes.  And, rather than learning from these mistakes, it seems that each one is more grievous than the previous.

Let me ask you: Does anything curious strike you about my version of the pattern (aside from the missing belt)?

Ding! Ding! Ding!  The prize goes to the woman in the front row.  YES! You may be scratching your head wondering why that skirt is hoisted all the way up to my boobs.  Frankly, I'm wondering the same thing myself and questioning how I could have made such a silly mistake.  I'm just glad I caught it before I cut out the fashion fabric.

SO, the lessons learned are (to be forgotten the next time I tackle a pattern):

• When you're 5'10", you ALWAYS have to lengthen the pattern.  ALWAYS.
• Take a GOOD look at the fashion drawing on the front of the envelope.  And, if there is one, take a good look at the flat sketch as well.

Silly, silly me!  I'm off to add, oh, a good two inches to my pattern.

HELP! My shoulders are falling off!

Hi everyone! I am perplexed. I probably could have sewn this dress up as-is and had it mostly fit OK, except that I have large arms and bust. *sighs* This is for a 42" bust and I'm a 44. And in the light of full disclosure I'm 37" in the waist, 45" in the hips, and I'm 5'8" and a lot of that is in my torso (these are empirical[is that the right term?] measurements as I'm a USAnian).

So I've done a slight FBA, and I did a rounded shoulder adjustment (I work in the IT industry, slave away at a computer all day). I also did an adjustment for full arms. The sleeves themselves fit but the fall off the shoulder is just... weird. Also... excuse the construction issues I was sleep deprived when I put it together and it just didn't seem that important to have all the seams the right way on a test muslin. But honestly, I'm not sure what to do at this point. I need to add length, since the dress is suppose to belt at true-waist and there are half inch seam allowances. It falls about an inch above my belly-button so 1.5 inches added in length?

So here are some pictures. As you can tell I totally did my hair and makeup for these (not).

(Design on this calls for some gathering at the lower back into the skirt. See weirdness of shoulder and set-in sleeve.)

(exhibit A of need for more length in the torso)

(outside of the weird way the shoulder falls, I kind of think this looks OK here)

I swear my shoulders aren't that lopsided, it has to do with the only one sleeve.

I had to take out some gaping in the back bodice but wasn't sure how to take the volume out of the sleeve cap to match, especially considering I needed to make the sleeve wider for my sausage arms. Please help! Suggestions, point me toward some tutorials? I realized this is my first real foray into a woven top. All my tops have been knits so far because they are so much easier to fake good fit. The sad thing here is that despite all the issues it STILL fits better than RTW wovens. *sighs* I think that once I can get the top of this dress to fit I'd really only need a couple alterations to make it a plain shirt pattern as well. That would be awesome.

McCall 4803 - Grading the Pattern

I've had the most fun reading everyone's progress!  My patterns finally arrived this week too, so I was able to get started.  Here is my trouser, McCall 4803:

First order of business was tracing and grading the pattern since the waist on this one is 26" and I haven't personally seen a 26" waist (at least not on my body!) since 1987.

I created a little tutorial on how I grade up pants (and skirts) on my regular blog, Quality Time. You can go read the tutorial there if you'd like! 

As a plus-size vintage lover, I've had to invest lots of time to little tricks to use these lovely patterns that, more often than not, are way too small.

Now I'm off to muslin!

Snowed in with Fabric

Hi everyone! Wow, some of you ladies work really fast. I got my supplies in last week and then had to work. Been working from home, in fact. Here in the Southeast there's an inch of ice and even more snow on the ground and everything is shut down. Plenty of time to sew with no place to go! I'll be back soon with an update about my first muslin. (I started this post a couple days ago, but then got distracted with things like long neglected house work and kids home from school the entire week. SHEESH)

I'm still here!

and I'm not slacking off, I PROMISE! I've redrafted the pattern using Tru-Grid which doubled as my "muslin". I don't like making an actual muslin because it feels like a waste of fabric and time. I know, I know. Anyhow, I managed to make a reasonable facsimile of the dress pattern and once I got it on my dress form, I realized that it was too BIG in certain areas. Now that? Something that NEVER happens. Which mean that I needed to monkey around with it a bit to get a decent fit including shortening the bodice by 2".

The bodice

Side Insert



Waist Adjustment 2"!



Sleeves



Once I had that done, I moved on to the skirt. I used my Tru-Grid to drap a skirt yoke for my border printed fabric.



Draping the yoke

After getting my yoke sorted, I turned to my better half to get the radius of a 44" circle so that I could make the hole in the middle of the fabric for my double circle skirt. Just so you know, the radius of a 44" hip measurement is 7". Which was TOO MUCH because I measured for a full circle and not a *double* circle. Silly me. But what the hey. Lemons, meet lemonade. I'm making a crinoline to go under this, so having some soft gathers at the hipline will work better than just having it fall straight down.

Using the crack in the floor!

Love that border print!

The dress form has the fashion fabric version pinned on and I'm still monkeying with the fit. It wasn't "just right" to quote Goldilocks and so I'm leaving it on the form to allow the fabric to get used to being worn. Overall, I'm very pleased with the way the pattern has come together. The side inserts are a royal beyotch though. I think there's a better way to do them, but since the fabric has been cut, I've got to follow Tim Gunn's advice and "make it work". I always do. Except when I don't and the remains of the dress end up in the rubbermaid tub for "later".

Simplicity 3619- Velvet Update

I'm happy to report that I have made some progress on my dress-- it's been incarnated in muslin!  I thought I would need to grade the dress since it's a 14 and I think I'm probably a 16, but decided not to make any changes until I had first sewn it up.  I wanted to see the construction of it so that I could better understand how the pieces work together.

The dress, amazingly, fits pretty well. I didn't realize until I took these pictures how uneven my shoulders are-- do they really do that in real life or am I just standing strangely?!?  It does seem to create a wrinkle that pulls from one shoulder to the opposite side of the waist (in both the front and back), I'm thinking I can correct that by either having better posture (which probably isn't going to happen), OR by adding a bit more padding in the sloping shoulder.  The dress does call for shoulder pads, which are not in use in the photo-- so maybe the shoulder pads will fix everything?  What do you think? I know in many patterns you can adjust the shoulder seam slightly on the one side, but this shoulder seam isn't on top of the shoulder-- it's actually brought forward to the front of the dress where it meets with a line of gathering, so I'm reluctant to fiddle with it much.

There's lots of gathering on this dress (on the sleeves, at the shoulder in front, where the bodice back meets the back yoke, under the bust, and of course, in the skirt), so some of the "wrinkles" in the photo are actually supposed to be there.

The only other change I may make is that the gathering below the bust feels like it sits just a tad too high-- maybe 1/4" (2.5cm) .  It's not really noticeable to the eye-- it's more about how it feels on me, so I might just leave it alone.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the length?  I kind of like the length where it is, but now that I'm looking at the picture, I wonder if I should go a tiny bit shorter?

This is the fabric that I am planning on using.  I bought it at Jomar Discount Fabrics in Philadelphia (if you live in the region, it's definitely worth checking out!  It was the go-to source in college for fabric for all of the design students).  It's a pink-ish red (perfect for Valentine's Day!), but I'm not sure of the fabric content.

I washed and dried the velvet in my washing machine/dryer (eek!).  I was a little worried about ruining it, but I really HATE dry-clean only clothing, so I risked it.  It came out much softer (the sizing has been washed out), and overall it looks pretty good.  I'm going to give it a good steaming, which will hopefully perk up the pile.

Du Barry 5766 - Muslin #2 and 2.5

This Muslin is 2.5.  I'm referring to it that way because it has one side front with the dart (as in the original pattern) and one side with a revised pattern which includes a princess seam.

I was having to shorten the dart so much that it quickly became a "short triangle" and I couldn't get rid of the "POOF" at the point. Before I allowed myself to get too frustrated, I began pinching out fabric on the left front to come up with a princess seam.  After marking my new "pinned" lines, I took that left front apart and recut a modified pattern (photo at my blog).  I think it will work so much better for me.  I still have to sew in the sleeves and should be able to determine if I need to remove some ease from the sleeve to omit puckers at the shoulder.

There are a few more details at my blog about today's adventures.

1940s "Empire Waist Trousers"

Hello everyone! I'm Ashley from Bramblewood Fashion and several other blogs. I've been sewing clothing for 5 years this month. But sewing in general since '95 when I was five years old.

After much thinking, and finding that some of my vintage patterns have gone missing, I decided on Decades of Style 1940s Empire Waist Trousers pattern. Fitting pants is something I don't understand yet, and they have been on my "to do" list since August of last year. I figured this sewalong would give me the push I needed to get started. The fabric I'm using is a lightweight pinstripe wool that was given to me.

~Ashley

Velvet 1940s Dress

I have a confession to make: I'm terrible at finishing anything I start--  especially my sewing projects!  I have my fingers crossed on this one, and I am really counting on you guys (and this sewalong) to keep me accountable.  I think doing this will really help me to stay on top of things.  And my hat goes off to Miss Muslin for starting the sewalong.  It looks like it will be a great success!

I haven't properly introduced myself yet.  My name is Elise and I blog at Dum Spiro Spero (which is Latin for While I Breathe, I Hope).  I never really sewed much at all until I went to college and decided that I wanted to major in fashion design.  I graduated from University of Delaware in 2002 with a B.S. in Fashion Design and promptly put away my sewing machine (I was burnt out!) and moved to NYC and abroad to chase other pursuits.

After a L-O-N-G hiatus, I've dusted off my sewing machine again and jumped into the fray.  I've only sewn one other vintage pattern before (blogged here), but it was from one of the reprinted patterns from Butterick so I'm not sure if that counts.  Fot this challenge, I've decided on a dress dating from 1940 that I purchased on Etsy from She'll Make You Flip.  I think it's lovely!

It's a bit of an unorthodox choice, but I've decided to make it out of velvet-- red velvet for Saint Valentine's Day when I hope to wear this.  I've seen so many dear velvet dresses from the thirties and forties and loved the way velvet really shows off seams and gathers.  I'm also loving velvet's return to front and center for Fall/Winter 2010/11.  I may shoot myself when I start sewing, though, because as I recall from sewing my senior collection in design school (I used a lot of velvet in my collection!), it has an awful tendency to creep.

I'm off to get down to business.  I'll be posting my muslin pictures soon, and then hopefully, I'll be cutting out the fabric by the weekend.  I'm looking forward to watching all of your progress, my fellow sewists!

Du Barry 5766 - Muslin #1

Details at Seams Well - my blog

Du Barry 5766 - Pattern Pieces



Had a request to post pics of the pattern pieces for the dress.  The little triangle piece is the inset.  It does not wrap all the way to the back of the dress; it is front only and becomes part of the side seam.  I'll explain more about it when I blog about the Muslin #1 (hopefully tomorrow.)



I made some pockets!

If I wasn't crazy for choosing this pattern, making four of these faced, interfaced, shaped and top-stitched pockets pushed me over the edge.   In the best way possible, just my kind of sewing.  I also interfaced my pieces, I'm taking the construction at a snail's pace.  Check out my blog for more details.