1933!

Here it is! My dress from a pattern from 1933...

I've had plenty of trouble with it, probably largely down to the fabric I chose. And I was nervous about trying a 1930's design right from the start. The illustrations are always very lovely but the silhouette seems so different from mine... And my previous efforts were less than successful (one was awful, the other one not a real success).

This is the pattern I used: An evening gown from Gracieuse magazine from October 1933. The one on the left. It is one of very few patterns in my collection (from 1930 to the beginning of 1934) which uses bias cut skirt pieces. Of course I knew working with fabric on the bias is tricky but I hoped it would be worth it. 

I used fabric from my stash, a striped cotton blend, for the skirt and bought soft black tule for the bodice (it is worn over a camisole). Of course, using stripes made things a lot more difficult. I would have to try and match them, at least at center front and back. At first, I also tried to match the stripes at the side seams but that caused to many issues with the fabric. And I didn't need more issues with that... This turned out to be the kind of material that just keeps on growing. In the end, I've had to unpick and re-sew them twice, the second time after letting the loose panels hang for a week. And even now, the side seams are not entirely free from pulling.

The bodice wasn't easy either. So many angles. Soft tule is a kind of material which gets gathered up by even loose stitches so I had to stitch it on tissue paper for all those little seams. And then pull the stuff away again, obviously. 
There's a double layer of it in the bodice and a single one in the sleeves. Unfortunately, the cut outer edges of the wide, fluttering sleeves have a tendency to get stuck to each other. 

Hemming the dress was a bit of an adventure in its own right. With patterns on tracing sheets, like this one, you usually get only a part of the skirt pieces with the measurement to which you should lengthen them. I had done that but it's didn't seem very precise in this case. I made sure the side seams matched in length but that was all I could really do on paper. And then the pieces were cut on the bias, in that ever-growing fabric and stitched, un-picked and stitched again. The bottom of the skirt was very uneven so I asked E to help me pin the hemline. The poor man didn't know what he was getting into... It took quite a while and he didn't like it but he did a good job. Pinning a hemline and then marking the positions of the pins with chalk so they wouldn't be lost if some of the pins fell out. The length of the skirt was determined by its shortest point at one of the side seams. As a result, it's ankle length now. I might have cut the pieces a little longer...

On its own, the dress's bodice is rather loose but, as you can see in the illustration, it was always meant to be worn with a belt. The silhouette is still unfamiliar to me but it is better than I expected.