All posts tagged: 1930s

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

Published by The Dreamstress

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.

Another dress for Windy Lindy

Published by The Dreamstress

I’ve found a way to satisfy my desire to make a whole new dress for Windy Lindy 2010. I’m helping Madame Ornata make one. Madame Ornata doesn’t swing dance, but she does dance, and she loves to dress up. So I convinced her to come to Windy Lindy. It turns out that she had a half cut out version of the notorious Vintage Vogue 2241, an original 1931 design. Now, 2241 is notorious for being difficult to adjust, fussy to put together, making no logical sense as a dress or a pattern, and (worst of all) looking like a sack when you do figure it out, unless you happen to have the approximate figure of a snake. The pattern looks like this: Now, Madame Ornata’s figure is deliciously un-snake-like, she doesn’t like to show off her back, and she needs to be able to dance in the dress without it falling off her shoulders. So the dress as it is was a no-go. But she already had the skirt cut out in the most fabulous …