Whatever happened to the girly tee? For a few years, back in the 90s and early noughties, things looked promising. Retailers, slowly realizing that women have money of our own these days and occasionally buy logo T-shirts too, introduced lady-specific blanks with scoopnecks, cap sleeves and shaped waists. I liked being able to buy a flattering, figure-hugging Elephant 6 or Trogdor tee. It said, “Yes, world! All this and great taste in pop culture too!” But lately — possibly for recession-related reasons — a lot of vendors seem to have gone back to the dark days of unisex, offering only traditional designed-for-men boxy tees, or as I call them, pajama tops. Which is fine if you only want to proclaim your love for a band on days when you’re too sick, hung over or depressed to leave the house.

I have too many T-shirts with great logos but unflattering cuts, and not enough form-fitting base layers. The next logical step was obvious.

To cut down this T-shirt into a camisole I used Jalie 2564, which like many Jalie patterns has received tons of positive reviews over at PR. The nice thing about the camisole is that it has a built-in shelf bra, and both camisole and bra can be cut from one T-shirt with a little fudging. This project was ridiculously easy even for me, with my limited experience of stretch fabrics and total lack of experience of fold-over or plush elastic. It whipped up in a little over an hour. It doesn’t even require an overlocker/serger; I could easily have used my machine’s zigzag and 3-step zigzag stitch instead.

My only quibble with this pattern is a matter of personal taste: I like my camisoles a bit sluttier. Next time I make this pattern I’ll definitely alter the design to make the straps wider-set, the scoopneck lower and the shelf bra shorter for increased balcon effect.

Obligatory Shearwater plug:

I’m loving my first tentative forays into the world of DIY lingerie! However, I am finding stretch lace and lingerie elastics (FOE, plush elastic, picot elastic etc.) difficult to source in colors other than white, black and nude. Tips on where to find these things are most welcome.

Most of the garments in my Please Try Harder drawer have needed little more than refreshing and reshaping to bring them back into play. This green cardigan started life as a soft and lovely but rather frumpy thrifted Brora sweater — round-necked, demure and with a bow under the chin. Sweet on somebody, but not on me.

I unpicked the bow, slit the sweater up the front and cardiganized it — stitched a length of ribbon to each cut edge, turned it to the wrong side and worked buttons and buttonholes through center front and ribbon. It’s a fast and easy conversion, but it does require some nerve to take a pair of shears to cashmere. I also reshaped the side seams to be more figure-hugging, as Brora sweaters tend to have a mumsy silhouette. This is a mod I perform on most of my sweaters now — all it takes is a simple straight stitch with a ballpoint needle, and you’ve instantly got a much more nipped-in and flattering shape.

Then there was the beach cover-up I bought from Zara in 2004 and the monstrously unflattering ankle-length linen pants I bought from the Gap in 2006. I lopped several inches off the hems of both, shortened and elasticized the shirt sleeves, reshaped the pant legs and accessorized. Total garments bought: 0. Totally new outfit: 1. Valid grounds for a little smugness.

Next on my list: my new skinny jeans demanded a voluminous top. The Japanese are particularly good at this — until I got my hands on my first Japanese pattern book recently, I had no idea “loose” didn’t have to mean “shapeless”. I decided to convert one of James’s old shirts to a Japanese-inspired smock top.

I embarked on this project freehand. After all, I’ve screwed up the classic man’s-shirt-to-woman’s-blouse project enough times with a pattern to feel I could hardly do worse without one. I removed the sleeves, unpicked the fronts and back from the yoke, cut the yoke narrower to fit my shoulders and then reattached the fronts and back, adding some red piping and dart tucks over the bust and at center back to fit them to the new smaller yoke.

My modifications had made the armscyes smaller, so I redrew the sleeve caps more or less freehand, without ease, and stitched them on. This is against all the rules, including mine, but seems to have worked okay; I’m not sure what the moral is here, unless it’s “Don’t sweat the sleeve caps.” Then I cut a new neckline and finished it with bias binding folded to the inside, put on some new buttons, hemmed everything up and voilà! It really was that easy, mostly thanks to the shirt’s check print. I highly recommend using stripes or checks — it’s like having graph paper to guide you all the way. Cutting, pressing, tucking and seaming can all be done with mathematical precision.

In our next installment: dresses from things that weren’t meant to be dresses!

After my wardrobe inventory, I purged my closet of all the irredeemable duds I hated the sight of or absolutely never wore. I also created a Please Try Harder drawer in my dresser for clothing I don’t like but have to keep until I can buy or make something nicer, because who can get by without any t-shirts? Then I set about the largest category in my wardrobe inventory: Needs Work.

Needs Work is practically ready-to-wear’s middle name. Nearly all my shop-bought garments have some tragic flaw. This blouse is all right, but the sleeves are unflattering. This skirt would be great if the hem were 2″ shorter. I would love this sweater if it were a bit more nipped in at the waist. And so on. So I’ve been revamping, reshaping, altering and generally titivating.

Accomplished so far:

• Redyeing all my black cotton. A lot of garments I’d vaguely assumed to be worn out were, on closer inspection, merely faded. I flung in a load of blacks with some Dylon Wash & Dye and hey presto! Half a dozen “new” tops in fresh-from-the-shop black.
• Shortening the hems of several vintage and me-made skirts to a more flattering length — just below the knee instead of at the widest part of the calf. This was also a great opportunity to redo hems I’d done sloppily the first time around.
• Hemming too-long jeans.
• Re-pressing crisp pleats into skirts and trousers.
• Pampering and prettifying my everyday handbag with a dose of nice leather conditioner.

Still to come:

• Darning yet more holes in my beloved Falke wool tights.
• Slicing off or reshaping bicep-squeezing puff sleeves on RTW blouses.
• Reshaping and cropping the waists of a sweater or two (sweaters that end near the natural waist seem to look better with skirts).

Contrary to my expectations, I find that mending or altering a garment makes me more attached to it rather than less. Instead of seeing a faulty garment whose imperfections have been patched up, I see something I’ve customized to my exact measurements and specifications, which feels faintly luxurious. I also feel a new bond with the garment, like working on it has given me a relationship with it that I don’t have with clothes I buy, wear and throw away. This definitely makes for a friendlier wardrobe!

A great way to use up all those spare petticoats you’ve got lying around the house. Enjoy!

• Download: Re-Make Wrinkles (PDF, 1.14 MB)

As satisfying to page through as Vogue in its own homely way, Woman is a typical women’s weekly magazine of the day, serving up a mélange of starchy advice columns, knitting patterns, fashion and beauty tips, household hints, schmaltzy short fiction and recipes — all with an unmistakably British stamp.

It’s absolutely impossible to read these issues and not be acutely aware there’s a war on. Nearly every article and ad is saturated with the realities and the mood of war — changed lifestyles, separation, extra work, rationing, shortages, challenges, anxiety, duty.

Rather unfairly, manufacturers of beauty and fashion goods advertised their wares even when there was depressingly little chance that women would actually be able to buy them:

But some things never change — in this case, the barrage of remedies for the bewildering profusion of digestive problems from which the women of Britain apparently suffer. (Seriously, am I the only woman on this island who doesn’t struggle with the mysterious affliction known as bloating? Probably not, but you’d never know it from the countless female-targeted ads for antacids, probiotic yogurts and, yes, laxatives.)

But I digress. Here’s an interesting insight into the received wisdom on personal hygiene in the 1940s. Remember, ladies, deodorize every few days and floss once a week! (James, wandering past the bathroom one night: “You floss?“)

Here’s a great example of what fashion editors had to contend with during the years of austerity restrictions, clothing rationing and shortages galore. “Here, love, pin a bit of dustmop on that butt-ugly frock!” I’ve left the image uncropped so you can also see a sample of the tepidly torrid fiction favored by Woman.

Finally, a sweet and innovative touch — colorful motifs for women to embroider to show in what branch of the forces their husband or sweetheart was serving:

Brazenly you can proclaim where your interest lies by working the emblem of your choice on the pocket of your dress, on a lapel, or on a scarf. More secretly you can decorate a slip, or work his emblem in the palm of your glove.

I had attempted to make up View 1 in a pretty and not particularly cheap floral cotton from MacCulloch & Wallis. After weeping tears of rage during successive failed attempts to set in the sleeves smoothly, I spent hours wrestling with the collar band and buttonholes — only to find that, done up to the neck, the blouse cut off the blood flow to my brain. (I rarely do muslins.) In a fury of frustration, I wadded the whole project into a lump — unfinished blouse, pattern, instructions, fabric scraps, pins and all — deep-sixed it into the garbage can and never spoke of it again. I wanted Simplicity 4750 out of my life.

Then came Fashion on the Ration. I needed to conserve fabric and coupons, so I decided to try my hand at cutting down one of James’s shirts into a blouse for myself. Simple, right? Only I need a lot of hand-holding, and I couldn’t find detailed instructions anywhere. I consulted Google. Surely there was some pattern from the wartime years with tips to help the industrious home seamstress make and mend her charming new blouse from his old shirt? Yes, indeed. Ohai! It was Simplicity 4750, my archnemesis.

What the hell. I decided to give our relationship another chance, seeing that nearly two years had passed and I was an older and wiser seamstress.

My friend Chris is a user experience geek, which means he spends most of his working (and leisure) hours thinking about how the design of things makes them easy or difficult to use. Like many passions, this interest in design has rubbed off on his friends, including me. Awareness of design is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it’s a great relief to discover that the difficulties you may have attributed to your own incompetence or lack of ability are actually the product of bad design. On the other, once you start noticing bad design, you see it everywhere. And, because design is the concrete expression of a relationship, what bad design expresses is the designer’s indifference to you, the user.

So it is with many everyday objects. However, Simplicity 4750 goes beyond mere indifference to cross the border into the confusing territory of frenemy. On the one hand, it’s such a simple, pretty and versatile pattern. So many views! So many moods! So many bow options! On the other, I’ve never met a pattern that so patently did not have my best interests at heart. I attempted View 3, made from this cast-off shirt of James’s:

First betrayal: the sleeves. If you’re one of those seamstresses who still blame themselves for set-in sleeve woes, I beg you to read “Sleeve cap ease is bogus” by Kathleen Fasanella, Esther’s tutorial on how to remove excess ease and the section on sleeve cap adjustments in Adele Margolis’s Make Your Own Dress Patterns. Opinion on how much ease to allow in a sleeve cap and where to put it varies, but by anyone’s standards, the sleeves on Simplicity 4750 are ridiculous. These are the pattern measurements:

• Sleeve cap: 4″ seamline to back notch + 6″ back notch to shoulder notch + 7″ shoulder notch to front notch + 3″ front notch to seamline = 20 inches

• Armscye: 3″ seamline to back notch + 4.5″ back notch to shoulder notch + 5″ shoulder notch to front notch + 2.75″ front notch to seamline = 15.25 inches

That is 4.75 inches of sleeve cap ease. This is not a gathered sleeve: the pattern illustrations show a smooth sleeve cap, and the instructions say to “ease in fullness”. That is physically impossible. Unrealistic expectations are one hallmark of a toxic relationship.

Just for laffs, I cut out the sleeve exactly as drafted and followed the instructions to the letter:

“Run gathering thread between notches… Pin sleeve in armhole, matching notches and small dots. Pull up gathering thread to fit. Baste seam, easing in fullness. With a damp cloth and iron, press sleeve above notches to shrink out fullness.”

This is what I got:

Very nice, but this is supposed to be a set-in sleeve, not a gathered sleeve. Right? Right? That’s what the illustrations and the instructions said. At least, I think they did. Ever heard of gaslighting?

Second betrayal: the neckline finish. View 3 is supposed to have a simple revere collar, with ruffles or lace sandwiched between the blouse and the facing. Fine, but if you’ve cut it out of a man’s shirt, there isn’t a facing. So how do I attach the lace and finish the neckline? When the going gets tough, the instructions fall silent.

I suppose I could have found some way to make enough ruffling out of the remaining shirt and attach it with a clean finish, but while trying on the unfinished blouse, I had to admit that ruffles and lace aren’t really me. So instead, I attempted various, less frilly collar alternatives from the shirt remnants. Pointed? Peter Pan? Band and bow? Nothing worked, and by then I’d run out of shirt fabric. Another wadder courtesy of Simplicity 4750.

Dear Simplicity 4750: It’s been interesting, but to be honest, I don’t think this relationship is going to work out. We want different things — I want to make and wear nice blouses, and you want to make me poke my eyes out with my own seam ripper. I think it’s probably better if we go our separate ways.

Anyone want a 1943 blouse pattern, 32 bust? It’s yours for the price of postage.

Here a model gamely demonstrates several ways of wearing a headscarf:

[Link]

This film shows how to make one dress do duty all week long by adding collars, waistcoats, false bodices and other embellishments:

[Link]

I showed that video to James, who wasn’t convinced. “‘Lancelot’s coming over — put on a pinny!’ That’s the best you can do for a Knight of the Round Table?“

Here are several ways to wear the ubiquitous turban — some more successful than others:

[Link]

Here’s her method for making your own handbag (assuming you could obtain a hide, which was a pretty big assumption at the time):

[Link]

And here’s her advice for making women’s hats from hubby’s. The amount of millinery skill she assumes is pretty impressive — how many women do you suppose actually owned a hat block?

[Link]

I like how some of these fashion ideas are so dubious even the models betray visible uncertainty. Still, it’s a great insight into how much innovation was required to stay smart in wartime.

And now for the giveaway!

Up for grabs is one copy of Complete Dressmaking in Pictures, a postwar British dressmaking guide edited by Constance Howard and published by Odhams Press. Those of you accustomed to freewheeling American vintage sewing books may be amused by the comparatively prim illustrations.

Others overwhelmed by the proliferation of sewing advice available in books and on the internet may enjoy how blessedly simple it makes sewing look by reducing the options to an acceptable few techniques.

The book also includes instructions for how to draft basic pattern blocks and adapt them to make the illustrated designs.

The Complete Dressmaking in Pictures giveaway is open to readers everywhere — just leave a comment below about your favorite wartime fashion tip! I’ll be picking a winner at noon (London time) on Monday, April 19.