1930's?

This is actually something I worked on before I went on holiday: the second installment of my Vintage Pattern Pledge, a 1930's dress from an unprinted pattern. I already blogged about it here, when I was just getting started.

In that post, I already mentioned the absence of grain markings and the tricky tucks which form the shoulder yoke. 
The rest of the dress was rather simpler to put together. There were no markings anywhere for closures though and no instructions about that either. I quickly noticed that the neckline would definitely need some kind of opening though, so I kept the center back of the yoke unstitched.

When I first tried the dress on, I still needed to make some more room to fit my head through. I might look like a sort of mid-depth square neckline in the drawing, the reality is very high indeed.

Of course, the dress is still unhemmed, the sleeves would need pleating in at the bottom and the neckline still has to be finished.
But why bother. It is supremely unflattering. I had high hopes for the styles of the early 1930's because they look so elegant in the illustrations. Even though I know I am the wrong shape for this era. 

The dress is not only extremely baggy (I'm pulling it in a bit behind my back in this picture) with a very high, tight neckline, those big sleeves also have rather tight armholes. Either he armscyes are too high for me, or even the top of the bodice is too wide. Quite probably both...

Belting it sort helps with the look although I don't think you are supposed to belt a 1930's dress as tightly as this.

I don't particularly feel like trying to fix this. One of my reasons to want to try these old patterns is to get an understanding of the real period shapes. I don't think I could make this dress look flattering on me and yet have it look like a proper 1930's dress.

Looking more carefully at the dress in this 1930's photograph, I have to say it looks rather sack-shaped as well, so maybe that's how it is supposed to look...

If you know, please tell me.
In the mean time, I won't continue working on this dress but I may try another 1930's item from a Gracieuse magazine. At least with those, I'm sure which size the design is meant for.

Fail

It doesn't happen to me that often anymore, but sometimes something just doesn't work out. And it would be unfair to keep those items from the blog, wouldn't it?
Case in point:

File this one under: Don't try to be too clever.
I was having misgivings about this dress even when drafting. Gathers don't always work for me, which is why I usually confine them to small sections or one side of a pattern piece (as in a twist). However, I silenced them, and blogged about how I made the pattern... Famous last words.

I will insist that the design idea itself isn't wrong. It should be possible to make a dress with lots of gathered sections. It just requires very fine, well controlled gathering and negative ease and/or gravity to pull those gathers taut. 
I kind of knew that but I was too worried about this fabric creating a straightjacket-like fit so I stuck with the basic shape of my new sloper. And I had forgotten the slight stiff-ness of this fabric. Which meant it didn't like being gathered by methods which involve machine stitching. 
I used basting thread instead but that made the gathers too big and too easily moved about.

I started to see the issues last night but decided to soldier on and at least finish the bodice. So, I continued, pinning carefully.
I hadn't made things easy for myself. Remember those sections in which I had eliminated the side seam? Those meant that there was only one possible order of construction and I really had to pay attention to that. All the while dealing with fiddly pieces of thin lycra lining and heavy gathered jersey full of pins...

The creative seam lines also mean that I can't take the bodice in at the sides to try and fix the fit. I'm sure the hip yokes would look a bit better if I attached the skirt, which would weigh them down and make the gathering look better. However, I don't think it's worth it. It wouldn't fix the top of the bodice. 
I have been too clever for my own good here, I've over-complicated things. And although I made this design to try and cope with the qualities of this particular fabric, it definitely didn't do the job. This fabric has simply too much bulk to work with so many gathers.
I've thrown out the bodice. I'm keeping the skirt pieces and the sleeves. The skirt consists of large rectangles (with curved tops) which could be cut up for something like a top and the sleeves have been drafted without gathers so they are probably OK...

Time for something else now.

About that red bra...

Ehmm... Do I really want to talk about this? 
Maybe not, but because I already announced it, I guess I should.

This is where it is now. Which, apart from its odd angle, does look like an almost completed bra. 

Until you notice this:

And know that those vertical drag lines don't disappear when the bra is put on.

What happened is this: Me being me, I wanted to make yet another bra design. The hardwear sort of dictated my choices: of the underwires I have (six sets), I thought the plunge one would be a bit too vavavoom for this fabric and lace, and two of the three slightly larger ones (for use with foam padding) were already earmarked for specific other projects, so I went with the "normal size for unpadded bra" wires. I also didn't have any stronger elastic in red for the bottom of the bra and decided to try a different solution from the one in the sage green bra. 
For this red bra, I would create a stand-out bottom band by encasing 3 cm wide elastic in the red lycra. Incidentally, this would also make the bra close a bit lower on my back. To avoid making the front of the bra look like one big block, I decided to try and leave out the normal bridge piece. I thought this would be possible because, to get a correct fit, I have to have the wire casings so close together that they touch at the top in any bra.

So far, so good. I then decided to go with the cup pieces from the sage green bra because those had already worked before. Makes sense, right?
Construction seemed to go smoothly as well although I worried a bit about the very stretchy lycra covering the hardly-stretchy-at-all net fabric lining in the lower cups. A justified concern, as it turned out. The bra in the picture was already taken partly apart to deal with baggy bits of lycra.
But that wasn't the worst of it. Those weird drag lines and the odd curve of the whole thing are caused by one thing and one thing only: there just isn't enough room for the wire.
I remembered from sage green one that the wire was a tight fit but I didn't worry about it. It fit them, so it would fit now. I certainly didn't measure it.......
BIG MISTAKE. The space for the wire, in both patterns is almost 1 cm shorter than the wire itself (and you need a bit of space to close off the ends of the casing, so you'll typically want the space for the wire to be about 1 cm longer).
I suppose I got away with it in the previous bra because a large part of the underwire casing was only connected to the cup and not to any other pieces. Here, on the other hand, there was that big solid band at the bottom which doesn't really allow for cheating. And now that I'm talking about it anyway: when I wear it, there are some minor horizontal drag lines at the bottom of the lower cup of the sage green bra. These are likely the result of that same wire issue.

To make a long story short, I'll have to re-do the entire thing. Fortunately, I have enough material, but I do not like it. (E. suggested cutting a bit off the wire, but I don't like that idea because I don't know any reliable methods to give the cut end a nice blunt edge again)

To err is human...

My dear ladies and gentlemen readers, I wonder, is any of you under the delusion that, either by years of obsessive practice or by some form of supernatural interference, I am incapable of having any of my sewing projects just not work out?

Well, I'm not. Sure, the influences mentioned above may give me an above average hit-versus-miss rating but I'm by no means immune to any of the errors in judgement which commonly lead to failed projects.

Picking unsuitable styles, poor fabric choice, haste?

Experience helps to lessen the occurance of the first two, but the third can pop up at any moment.

And experience and success breed their own particular error in judgement. Hubris. Pride at one's accomplishments, leading to a false sense of invulnerability.

Case in point?

At the end of my last post, I casually mentioned I might just make a quick 60's dress, just because I could.

Famous last words.

If you've been following this blog for a while, you will know that waistless mini dresses are not my usual thing. But past experiences had made me confident of my ability to make different shapes work for me. And last year's purple dress was really nice...

Because I wasn't too sure about the style and because the colour was really nice, I used fabric, cotton flannel, left over from my red trousers.

Of course, this style of dress being so simple, I just knew I could make this in next to no time.

The pattern was easy enough. Curved french darts for bust shaping at front, the only waist shaping in the back darts, skirt widening to A-line below the waist.

Afraid it would be too simple, I decide to make center front and back seams with 'cording' sewn on both sides into the seam allowance. Because I didn't have any cord of the right thickness, I used strips of fleece, sewn double. And because I was short on fabric, I made the sleeve about three quarter instead of full length.

The end result, as you can see, is just mwah. And this is after ironing it. The seams for the 'cording' pull too hard on the rest of the fabric, making it all look a bit crumbled. And this style is just not that great on me.

E, always an honest judge of how things look on me, didn't like it at all first time he saw it, got a bit milder after I ironed and decided it might sort of work with some crazily coloured thights (I only have bright red, which doesn't work with this colour).

I was disappointed by this thing and I should remember not to be tempted to make anything in a hurry.

To make matters worse, I'm now finishing a cardigan which, also, didn't quite work out as planned. I that case, I may just have been trying to be too clever for my own good... I'll show you when it's finished.