the Marion hybrid dress

Here it is! My first genuine 1950's designed dress (worn here with my vintage shoes). As I told you in my previous post, it's a hybrid, combining a 1957 bodice with a 1953 skirt. However, the bodice is such a basic design that I don't expect it would have been out of style 4 years before it was published. I stuck with the idea of differently coloured bands at the bottom of the skirt but, inspired by various dresses in Marion, I decided to do the small details in white (I used plain off-white cotton, lots of 50's dresses have details like collars or edges on pockets in white cotton pique). 

I made the decorative button placket on the bodice so I could repeat those colours, white and brown there.

Worn with a belt, it looks fine. I like the look of sleeve and I like the pockets.

The skirt is, surprisingly, not that full (of course skirt width, like skirt length went through various stages). the single piece back is slightly less than half a circle. Parts of that same shape form the side front pieces while the center front has gathers. The pockets are in those front seams. I made it the length ordered by the pattern: 67 cm.

The rate of movement which the sleeves allow is OK, as long as you don't have to reach up a lot.

Take the belt off, and the fitting issues are on display: During construction, I took the waist in by 1 cm on each side seam, so I took out 4 cm in all. It's still a bit too wide. It's also about 1 cm too high on my body. The bust dart points to about 0.5 cm above the apex of my breast and I should also have removed some width in that area. I also usually make the front waist darts longer than they are here, to get a more fitted look just below the bust. 
Some of these issues are definately down to me being unfamiliar with Marion's sizing. The sizing chart didn't include a back length measurement, so the only way to find out about that was to just go ahead and make something. The adjustment I made to the waist, was the difference between the waist measurement for that size and my own, so I am surprised to find out they apperently added quite a bit of ease there. 
On the other hand, for the lady in the picture for the 1953 dress, it's not such a close fit either. Maybe our ideas of this last golden age of the wasp waist are just a bit over the top...
With that in mind, I should be OK using Marion patterns if I lengthen the bodices by 0.5 cm above the bust and 0.5 to 1 cm between bust and waist and take out width according to the sizing table.