All posts filed under: 20th Century

Madame Ornata’s sapphire blue 1930’s dress – the bodice

I’ve  skipped ahead a bit with Madame Ornata’s 1930s dress, showing you the finished (well, mostly) product before all the construction shots, so it’s time for a re-cap. To make the slippery silk charmeuse easier to work with, and to help the bodice hang better (and hide any lumps and bumps), we flat lined the bodice pieces in an adorable cotton print from Madame O’s stash. Madame O and I worked on the dress together – one person pinning and ironing while the other person sewed.  It was a very fun and efficient way to sew. The skirt is topstitched to the bodice, but we tried to hide the stitching everywhere else on the dress, so there was a lot of very, very careful, slow stitching. For the most part, I was the sewer, and Madame O was the ironer and pinner, and (most importantly), fetcher of cups of tea. With everything assembled, we did a final fitting.  I ended up having to take in the sides of the bust a tiny bit to make …

Windy Lindy: What we wore

I’m sure that you are all wondering what I eventually decided on as my Windy Lindy dress. Well, as per popular demand, I wore the green dress. OK, in all honesty, I didn’t feel like wearing the serious undergarments that the white and black dress require, and I didn’t find the red dress until a few hours before the dance. You have excellent taste though, dear readers, as I did feel that I looked rather fetching. I paired the dress with a gold necklace, a silk peony rose and a butterfly in my hair, and gold dancing slippers. Madame Ornata looked rather fetching too.  We didn’t quite finish her dress (we had to sew her into it as the back fastenings weren’t done), but I do believe she was the belle of the ball.  She just looked so perfectly period, and the sapphire silk was so striking – you could spot it anywhere in the room.

Finished project: 1920’s inspired ‘Tango’ dress

I made this dress as a project in university. The brief was to make a basic fitting toile, and then to draft a garment pattern from that. This was not the dress to flat pattern draft.  It would have been much, much easier to drape it on a dressform. But it still turned out pretty well.  We call it the ‘dress that fits anyone’, because it does.  And looks good on them to. I based the design on a image of Edna St Vincent Millay.  The patterning isn’t at all accurate for a 1920s dress (princess seams!), but the effect is still charming. The fabric is silk crepe.  There was quite a story with the fabric – I looked and looked, but all the reds I could find had an orange tinge. So I spent my entire fabric budget on some muted jade green silk charmeuse because it was soooo beautiful. And then realised that this was the wrong dress for muted jade green silk charmeuse.  And whinged about it for days. So my dear, …