All that glitters…

When I design dresses, I usually start my drawing on top of a person outline I copied from a how-to-draw book: a basic, standing straight, facing the front, 7 heads tall, two heads wide kinda deal. At some point (probably in a high school textiles class) I was given a page of 'fashion figures', outlines of wispy ladies leaning this way and that, with legs at least a third longer that your average human. I do not understand these. One of the great woes of art is that the thing you end up with never quite reaches the glory of what you imagined – so why would you start your design even further in the realm of the impossible?

Even so, one day I thought I'd try out these figures, and drew myself a 1930s style evening dress.

I decided I didn't like the figure but I did like the dress, and thereon kept an eye out for gold lamé. I eventually found a Very Shiny gold chiffon while shopping in Cabramatta. I knew I would need a lot, but at $4 per metre I could afford to give myself a good margin. I bought 10 metres of fabric and a coordinating thread and Hong Kong binding – a dark khaki that disappeared into the gold perfectly.

Time Passed. This year, the dress filtered to the top of the 'potential project' pile in my mind. A couple of friends had weddings coming up, which a floor length bright gold dress would be Wildly Inappropriate for, but I was also invited to a 30th birthday at a speakeasy-style bar and that made a good goal for a 1930s dress.

I started with a couple of decisions, one being to omit the cape so I could wear a jacket. The other was to make the waist ruching part of the skirt piece instead of a separate sash – mostly to make the patternmaking more interesting.

To make the pattern, I first tried to drape the kind of look I wanted onto my dress form, but that didn't get me what I wanted. Then, I decided to do an initial flat pattern and drape from there. Of course, when making a woven evening gown, the obvious starting point is a pattern for a knit pyjama top (what?) – but it worked.

My steps were:

1. Making a tunic with the right fit
2. Dividing the front into the two panels
3. Expanding the smaller panel to allow for ruching

I started by doing cut and spread. Given that I wanted the ruching to lead back to the shoulder seam, I ended up with very fine cuts. This didn't give enough ruching, so after experimenting some more with the mock-up, I lengthened the pattern at some points down the body.

 

For the skirt, I started with Style 1353. I cut a back and a front, and mirrored the top halves to be all across the hips while allowing sufficient fabric for shaping later. I also left a lot of fabric above where the pattern ends on the front piece to use for the ruching. Once mocked-up, I took the skirt side seam in a fair bit, as this part of the dress is meant to be not so flowy.

 

Then I took it apart and updated my pattern. The back and front ruching sections are on the front skirt pattern, so the ruching goes around without a seam, while the skirt does have a seam.

The flowy part of the skirt I mocked up in miniature so I could see how the circle pieces would behave without using huge amounts of fabric. There are two of these spirals to go along the diagonal edges of the skirt and a semicircle between them on the long side.

With all my pieces worked out, it's time to cut.