We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us make clothes

With sewing lessons booked, I decided to put all sewing projects on hold until I had completed the lessons but halfway through the course I couldn’t bear it any more. So on a Friday night, after having handed in a uni assignment during the day, I decided I must have a new dress now and started scouring the pattern boxes and the stash.

I wanted something 1940s style, particularly in the vein of this dress:

Source

My sudden interest in 1940s dresses came about because for the last few months I have been playing through the Bioshock series of video games. The first two games are set in the 60s but in a city that isolated itself from the rest of the world in the 40s, so the styling of the place is more reminiscent of the earlier time. Fiction I consume tends to make it to my wardrobe almost as fast as it gets to my brain, so after a few hours of starting at a computer game full of 40s clothes I began staring at my cupboard wondering why there weren’t any there. I wanted some 40s-style dresses of an everyday, utilitarian kind, which is bizarre because I am usually all about the extravagant.

My pattern search turned up very little that was useful but I did find a 1970s bias cut 4-gore skirt pattern that was nice and picked one of the blouse patterns fairly arbitrarily – probably for the sake of the sleeves. The drawings on the front make it look alright but it really is horribly sack-like.

I spent the evening making a mock-up and adapting the pattern. In the bodice, I added pleats to the waist, gathers to the shoulder seams, changed the neckline and swapped the button up front for a zip in the back. I also made the back more fitted by tracing from this tunic which fits me very nicely.

This meant adding fabric in the shoulder area and losing a fair bit in the waist. The changes were all done by draping the mock-up which I then took apart and traced back onto the pattern. I have since been assured that this is very much The Wrong Way to do things and that centre back seams should be straight. This is why I’m having lessons. That said, it still worked although perhaps doesn’t sit as nicely as it could. The skirt I left as it was except that for the waistband I just cut a strip of fabric to my measurements and gathered the back skirts and bodice to fit it (they didn’t need to be gathered much). By 1.30am I had a mock-up I was happy with.

On Saturday, after spending the morning doing assignments, I bought fabric, washed fabric and cut fabric. The fabric I got is a printed homespun. It has a much nicer texture than other ‘homespun’ fabric I have used – I think it might be brushed. It also didn’t crinkle after washing which is very pleasing.

I sewed Saturday night and Sunday Morning but was foiled in my attempts to finish the dress on the weekend by lack of an invisible zipper foot for my new machine. I bought one on Monday and finished the dress. I had a false start with the hem because I decided to be different and actually look at the pattern instructions which recommended a 1¼" turn up finished with bias. I did this and it looked awful. So I have redone it with my usual method of a small double fold hemmed by hand.

I like this dress. So do other people, apparently – it’s done fairly well in the random compliment stakes. And someone took one look at me and said "40s dress" so I think I succeeded stylistically. Another time I would put side seams in the waistband to give it shape but otherwise I would leave it largely as is. Of course, when I make this style of dress again I will probably adjust other things for variety but I am very happy with this dress.

Anniversary thoughts

I have now, as of September, been costuming for 10 years. At the start of the year, when I finished my Eowyn costume, I found myself reassessing my hobby. The last few things I’ve made I have been really happy with and proud of what I’ve achieved but they still weren’t as good as I wanted. I am aware that nothing ever will be – but, while over the last 10 years I’ve watched my standard of work constantly improve, at the beginning of this year it seemed to have plateaued.

I’ve felt a need to ‘level up’ my sewing before. At the first Jane Austen festival I went to I was inspired by the quality of the other costumer’s work, including these two bloggers. After that I started doing little things, like pressing seams during construction, which add so much to the final look of a garment and my quality of work improved significantly in that period.

One of my favourite things about costuming is the constant learning. With every costume you have to acquire new skills and improve your techniques. But at the start of this year it seemed to me that I was no longer doing that. My work was good but I consistently had fitting problems. I was also taking too much time and too many mock-ups to create a pattern through a guess and check method. I was sure there were better ways to do things but I seemed to have reached the limit of what I could teach myself. “I’ll just have to give it up” I thought to myself. I don’t think I ever seriously considered that – I love sewing too much – but I needed to find away to continue to improve.

These are my planned projects (subject to change at any time, etc) that I’m excited to keep improving my skills with:

At the same time, people were beginning to ask me to give them lessons or make costumes for them. Lessons were a bit awkward because while I definitely can sew I don’t have any verified techniques or knowledge to pass on. Commissioned work also posed a problem because while I didn’t want to work for free I also wasn’t comfortable with charging by the hour when I was using techniques that were inefficient timewise. I also didn’t want to charge a lot for work that wasn’t finished in a professional manner. Which, given the time cost to me that a commission represents, made significant projects for others not something I could do.

I have not done any sewing for a few months. But this is not despair – it is hope! In July I enrolled in sewing lessons but they didn’t start until the end of September so I decided to put off all projects until after the lessons so that I could use my new skills to make my costumes as good as possible. (It was also really convenient – I spent that time either being sick or desperately trying to catch up on uni because I had been sick, and benefited from not having my brain trying to figure out a sewing project as well.)

I have been excitedly looking forward to the course since I enrolled, greatly confusing everyone I told about it who all looked weirdly at me and said ‘but you can already sew’. But I knew I would learn better, more effective ways to sew and I couldn’t wait. I am starting in the beginner class but that doesn’t mean it’s all easy or just going over things I know. It’s ‘beginner’ - not as in simplified but as in these are the proper, professional foundational techniques that you need to know first, before you learn the other ones. I’m nearly finished the first class in the series and I have learned so much. I’ve also bought so much – the first lesson was on useful tools.

Loot!

We Could be the Same

One of the weird things about costuming is how while you’re working on a project it can be completely consuming but after it’s finished it can just disappear completely. This is why it is important to photograph projects. I was looking through my photos a while back and got a shock to see these dresses because I had completely forgotten I made them.

Actually, that’s not completely true. I remember doing the painting. I know I spent a summer carefully painting these designs on a table with a lamp under it with a recording of Eurovision 2010 playing over and over again in the background. But that’s it. All the construction memories had gone and even the painting memory wasn’t attached to a particular project, just Eurovision.

(Suggested listening here. Or here if your musical tastes tend to calmer)

A long time ago I made a Barbie as the Island Princess costume for one of my cousins. A year or so later I had a request for two Barbie outfits so they could have one each. This time the costumes were from Barbie and the Three Musketeers.

 The short, sparkly skirts were easy – one seam, elastic and hem.

According to my notes, for the bodices I used Vogue 7845. (My notes don’t say a lot else, unfortunately.) As with the Island Princess dress I decided to have fabric over the shoulder for inset sleeves rather than having the dress held up by semi-detached sleeves. Because the necklines were annoying enough as it was I didn’t want to have to deal with having them open and close. Instead I made the bodice closure using a trick I’d learnt from a princess bodice I found in an opshop: put the zip in upside down.

By far the biggest challenge of this project was the painting. Each dress in the Barbie Musketeer series had its own skirt design repeat and bodice design repeat. As ever, I wanted to be accurate so I had to recreate these. I also decided to correct the off-centeredness of the patterns found on the dolls used in the promo photos I was using as a reference.

To make the patterns I spent a lot of time fiddling with autoshapes and curled clipart in PowerPoint (PowerPoint is an excellent graphics manipulation program).

This was the result, for the bodice and the skirt front:

 

We printed it out full size and I’m not sure what happened next. I know I painted by tracing something, probably a drawing based on of the printout but with the lines curved correctly and the swirls the right length (the computer design was mostly for scale and placement). I suspect I used a seperate set of transparencies for each colour and traced over these. As with all freehand designs I got my mum to draw out the tracing guide because I am not neat enough. 

For the purple stomacher I printed out a photo of the doll bodice at A4 size which was blurry but the pattern was visible. Mum drew it for me on plain paper and we photocopied it onto a transparency I could paint over. 

Mum also drew out the skirt design for me. The doll dress has kind-of glowy pink bits in the dress panel and I managed to find a gorgeous satin that had the look of being softly dyed with different shades.

Here are the finished results:

 

 

 

This was the project where I discovered fabric paint which turned out to be a very useful discovery. In particular, the gold bottle which I bought for this dress has served me very well.

The skirts are all lined with gold satin and close with hooks and bars.

Completed dresses:

 

(Please excuse the crumples – the dresses had been in a suitcase for two days.)

Barbie belongs to Mattel