All posts tagged: 1930s

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween! Hope you are all having a delightful holiday with lots of inventive costume fun-ness, apples to bob for, caramel corn, doughnuts on strings and other delicious old-fashioned treats. Do you need some last minute costume inspiration? Let’s look at some suggestions from a 1930s Bestway Fancy Dress and Carnival Costumes catalogue. Would you go as a ‘Flower’, a ‘Clown’, or ‘May Day’? Or perhaps you want to lord it over ‘May Day’ as the ‘May Queen’, go as a different variant of the clown look in ‘Hoop-La’, or throw political correctness to the wind as a ‘Red Indian’? A more acceptable form of national dress might be ‘Tyrolean’, or you can avoid cultural issues altogether as a generic ‘Peasant’ (I’d love to see the kid who dreams of being a peasant for Halloween). Slipping even lower on the social scale is the ‘Charwoman’ costume, and slipping between the sheets is the adorable ‘Lavender Bag’ (sorry, that sounds wrong). How about an adorable ‘Kitten’ (or Black Cat, if that’s how you play it), ‘Drummer …

The ’30s Garden Party frock

Published by The Dreamstress

Reminder! One day left to enter the Giveaway! One of the upcoming classes I’m teaching is a ’30s garden party dress class. I love ’30s garden party dresses – you know the ones; chiffon, ruffles, floral prints, with that incredible ’30s ability to be ridiculously cutesy feminine and very glamorous and sophisticated at the same time. For the class, I’m debuting an idea I’ve been working on. A lot of 1930s dresses are made from very similar patterns: a basic bodice, married to a full-ish skirt attached with an interestingly seamed dropped waistline, with a choice of sleeve treatments. I’ve taken this formula, and am turning it into a pattern that allows lots of choices, while still being a good introduction to vintage ’30s sewing techniques. To start with, my pattern has a basic bodice. I’ve taken the bodice from patterns like Excella E3006 – this type of bodice has the advantage of back princess seams, great for adding a little more shape and fitting a wider range of bodies. For necklines, my pattern has …

The ‘Deco Mermaid’ beach pyjamas

Published by The Dreamstress

Remember the ‘Deco Echo’ blouse I made back in February? You may even remember the pants I was wearing with it as a 1930s beach pyjama set. I didn’t tell you about them, because, well, they weren’t actually finished. And by not actually finished I mean ‘something that I’m terribly ashamed to admit was held on with safety pins’. Yeah. I confess. I was so rushed in the run-up to Art Deco weekend that I didn’t manage to get the everything remotely properly finished, and the pants were one of the items that were terribly put together, terribly badly finished, and just not OK. (see example below) But with a 20s/30s challenge coming up on the Sew Weekly and a trip home to Hawai’i I had the perfect opportunity to actually make my beach pyjama pants properly. My inspiration for the garment and the look was the beach pyjamas that were so popular at beach resorts in the 1920s & 30s. They are such an elegant, practical garment, but not what we usually expect from …