Simplicity 3912 (and a brush with death)
In retrospect, it was fairly pointless to spend precious sewing time making a summer dress during such a lousy excuse for a summer. But oh well, if I ever move somewhere warm, I will have Simplicity 3912 to skip around in.
The pattern is from 1959. I decided to make View 3:
I have a healthy amount of skepticism about the fashion drawings on pattern envelopes, so I was aware that there’d be some differences in the finished garment. My waist isn’t quite as dainty as in the picture, partly because I don’t usually wear a girdle and partly because I am a human being and not a line drawing. Also, I was pretty sure a straight skirt with a few soft pleats up top wouldn’t hang in that graceful bell curve all by itself. I’m not certain how you would attain that shape, even with a petticoat. But the dress ended up looking all right. The fabric is a delicately textured cotton in “Mums on Tatewaku Curved Lines Yellow” from the delightful Fabrictales.com:
And here is the finished dress. Don’t be fooled by the sunshine in the photo. The FLB and I had just returned from the park because huddling under a blanket to shield ourselves from the icy wind was starting to feel more like an SAS endurance exercise than a pleasant Sunday.
The skirt has a medium twirl factor.
Speaking of the twirl factor, a slightly startling anecdote: My friend Gaia loves her new mermaid dirndl. So much so that when she wore it to work on Friday, she couldn’t help slipping out of her chair throughout the day to give it a little twirl. It was during one of these “dirndl breaks”, while Gaia was reportedly humming a tune from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, that the workmen renovating her office lost their grip on a large, heavy, sharp-edged sheet of metal, which then smashed through the window above her desk to land in a deluge of broken glass on her chair. The chair in which she would have been sitting if she hadn’t just gotten up for another twirl. It was only thanks to the mermaid dirndl — and, in her words, “my MGM gang-bang musical fixation” — that she escaped decapitation.
Vintage sewing saves lives!
