This dress started life before I was born. As a French tablecloth.

Fashion on the Ration rules allow me to purchase secondhand clothing and fabric items coupon-free as long as they come in below a certain price threshold. The threshold is set low enough that I usually can’t thrift in London, but while behind enemy lines in Strasbourg I picked up a vintage tablecloth for €2. With that print, it was crying out to be made into a classic 60s shift dress. This pattern dates from 1968.

The fabric was limp, had transparency issues in places and didn’t feel particularly nice against the skin, so I decided to give it body and softness by underlining it. I stripped off the back of an old Ikea duvet cover thoughtfully donated by a friend (thanks, Lila!), dyed it chocolate brown with Dylon and used that as underlining, which didn’t complicate things as much as I’d thought because the dress consisted of only three main pieces (1 front, 2 back).

Ease seems to be the randomizing factor in any given pattern. You never know until you pull the pieces out of the envelope and compare them against your body measurements whether a size 12 will actually be an 8, 10 or 16. In this case, the pattern was marked for a 32.5″ bust but, even though I am a 34″, I ended up taking it in rather than grading it up. The ease around the bust was fine for a 34″, but the waist lacked any shape and there was way too much room at the hips. I redrew the waist curves to give a bit more definition and slimmed down the hips by about 2″.

It’s interesting. A dress like this must be custom-fitted to look even halfway decent. That’s incredibly easy for the home dressmaker — this pattern, for instance, has only three seams and four darts — but in RTW, women expect dresses to fit right off the rack, so custom-fitting isn’t really an option. This means the simple dart-fitted dress has become something of a rare bird. When I wear one around London, people register it as unusual without really knowing why. (A massive screaming psychedelic print doesn’t hurt, of course.)

In honor of its bedsheet-and-French-tablecloth roots, I call this the Alain’s Psychedelic Breakfast dress.

Lessons learned:

• Underlining can boost the capabilities of a fashion fabric. Underlining in fairly tightly woven 100% cotton made this fabric much, much easier to work with, gave it added body, hid handstitching on the hem and facings and made it crisp and comfortable against my skin. Excellent for a semi-fitted shift. Top tip: cheat by sticking the layers together with 3M SprayMount before machine-basting them together!
• Determine the fiber content of your vintage fabric before you press. Alongside the vintage cigarette burns, this dress now also features a nice scorch mark from my iron. Whoops! Synthetic!
• Insert zippers on the flat where possible. I can’t remember whose blog gave me this handy tip, but it made all the difference — I inserted the center back zip before I began assembling the main garment pieces, and it was so much easier.
• Resist the urge to overfit. I nearly did my usual and went too far with the darts and side seam shaping. This dress is meant to be fairly straight-up-and-down.

Burda 7517

Why did I decide to sew this pattern? I can’t remember now. It’s a typical Burda design– I’ve gotten all the way through the project and still can’t make up my mind about it. Is it quirky-in-a-good-way or just plain weird?

The fabric went on a long journey before ending up as this dress. It started out as yardage in Ikea’s “Josefin” print:

I decided last fall that this fabric would be our curtains and then, in a totally and inexplicably illogical move I am slowly coming to recognize as classic Susannah, wildly overbought. By now I am sick of the sight of this print, but I’m on the ration and fabric is fabric. And I do love the idea of a dress made out of curtains.

I dunked the fabric in a bleach bath until the color changed from deep teal to pale green, then plunged it into a vinegar-and-water stop bath. Then I overdyed the fabric in Dylon Amazon Green, a color to which I’ve become strangely addicted. The result is a green that goes well with my summer tan and a print that’s toned down but still noticeable.

I hand-sewed yellow ribbon at neckline and hem while watching Cranford and drinking gin. James came home during the last episode and we took turns doing Convalescent Blonde and Soppy Regency Doctor.

When virgins get typhoid, we poo candyfloss!

Gandalf??

You’re a long way from Rome, Octavian! But I digress.

The verdict on this dress: undecided. Like many “easy” sewing patterns, it did go together quickly and fit without a fuss, but the end result kind of reflects the effort spent. It’s fine but not ravishing. Also, if you’re at all the perfectionist type it will drive you bonkers that the arty pleats shift and gape every time you move. Still, on the whole, a good throw-on-and-go wardrobe staple for warmer weather. Crisp, tidy and ladylike.

Lessons learned:

• Unless you wear a crinoline, think hard before buying 20 meters of anything. What was I thinking??
• Test your fabric to make sure unpicked stitches won’t leave needle holes. This is very tightly woven cotton and it’s difficult to steam away the traces of former seams.
• Beginning a dress “to wear in this hot weather” will instantly cause the temperature to plummet below 70°F and stay there.

The wardrobe, reimagined asks how women in fashion eras that offered fewer wardrobe options got around the problem of style line/body shape mismatch (corsetry?), and hammers home my dilemma with this simple infographic for dummies on What the Short-Waisted Woman Should Not Wear:

I don’t know about you, but my eyes instantly gravitate to the outfit on the left. Completely scrummy, right? Only it’s completely WRONG. We short-waisted types are supposed to line up to the right, behind Bella Swan there. I have been coveting the high-waisted, figure-hugging, demurely slutty pencil-skirted secretary look for years, but apparently it and I were never meant to be. I blame you for this futile passion, Joan Holloway.

Click the image and prepare to lose hours of your life. Many, oh so many, Mad Men fashion postmortems await.

We are very lucky to be living and sewing at a time when we have a proliferation of styles to choose from, so even though it might be difficult renouncing my Mad Men dreams, I’m not condemned to wearing silhouettes that don’t suit me. Right now I’m shifting focus away from waist/hip-conscious eras (40s, 50s) and experimenting with leg-conscious ones (60s, 70s). Bonus: the UK is still somewhat stuck in the Benny Hill era sexually, so its collective leg fixation is alive and well.

I’m finding this vintage Playboy photo immensely inspiring. Talk about playing up your assets. She could have Starbucks-sized muffin top tucked inside that dress and no one would notice.

Via The Selvedge Yard.

Here’s one vintage pattern I have plans for:

Here’s another:

Still a bit of Betty Draper going on in View C's hat, and isn't that a teenage Joan in the back?

Right! I’d better get cracking before the British summer ends!

What are your thoughts on picking vintage looks or projects to suit your body type? What do you do when your taste doesn’t suit your own shape?

Five minutes after first laying eyes on this print I knew I had to have it or live the rest of my hollow, blighted life haunted by irreparable regret. I also knew exactly what I would make with it. It was as though the heavens opened and the Craft Gods spoke: Let There Be a Rocket Age Dress.

Simplicity 3580 is a classic Mad Men-era shirtwaist dress. I bought the pattern at The Vintage Peddler.

And here is the finished dress. I can never get over the wonder of looking at (or wearing) something I made that was only a picture in my mind a few days before.

Store-bought clothes are so miserably skimpy these days that a skirt this full feels totally luxurious. I would love to see how this looks with a crinoline, but I’m not sure I have the guts to actually wear one.

I feel like a glamorous teacher in it (Miss Swetnick?), or the genteelly alcoholic mom in a Raymond Carver story.

This dress went together without many tears, except for the sleeves. (See below.) I wish I’d started sewing on quilter’s cotton instead of on linen and wool, because it is so well-behaved and forgiving to work with. It holds folds extremely well. And creases. Working the wrinkles out of an acre of cotton every time I wash this dress eats up nearly an hour of my life. I hate ironing so I rarely bother to do it properly. This is only one of many, many reasons I would make a lousy ’60s housewife [mops spilled sherry off laptop with sleeve].

Lessons Learned:

• Choose your interfacing with care. I guess it’s one of those things that only comes with experience, but I keep choosing interfacing with the wrong hand or weight for my projects. In this case, I was in a hurry to finish the dress so I used some interfacing from my stash, which turned out to be too crisp and made the collar and bodice front a little stiff.
• Let go of hem paranoia. I hand-finished the hem to this skirt. I put in way too many stitches (as in every 1/16″), often picking up more than a single thread of the skirt fabric, and pulled my stitches too taut, all in the fear that the hem wouldn’t be sturdy enough. This resulted in hem show-through on the right side of the skirt.
• Don’t trust the pattern blindly. I had all sorts of trouble with the set-in sleeves, partly because the pattern wasn’t particularly well drafted, partly because too much ease was allowed for a cotton fabric and partly because of my own ineptitude. Subsequent research suggests that many commercial patterns have badly drafted sleeves and inaccurate instructions (too-large seam allowances, for instance) requiring you, the seamstress, to redraft the sleeve and set it in according to your own lights if you don’t want puckers and drag lines. If anyone else has figured out a fix for this problem in similar patterns, I’d love to hear it.
• Foundation garments allow for glove-tight fitting. I fitted this pattern to my figure without foundation garments, which resulted in a more relaxed fit because my measurements can fluctuate slightly. For the true Mad Men fitted-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life look, I would have had to commit to period foundation garments and wear them every time I wore the dress.

Still, I like this dress — just putting it on creates a sense of occasion. Cocktails in the bomb shelter at five!