I have been sewing up a storm lately, but haven’t been able to get my act together to post anything until today. Maybe because I made a dress from a new pattern and I’m really happy with how it turned out, so I figured it was worth the effort.

I’ve been on a mail order pattern bender lately. It seems like so many of them not only came in the short woman’s beloved half sizes, but were made in silhouettes that were not only flattering on the average woman, but featured things like pockets and practical bodices.

I was really intrigued by the horizontal pleats and tucks on the bodice of this one. I’m sure there is a really striking way I can highlight this with the right fabric pattern, but I haven’t figured it out yet. Besides, for a first go at this pattern (as a “wearable muslin”) I wasn’t going to sweat the details too much. I learned a few things from this first go around that I will fix in the next one I make. For one, it called for gathers instead of pleats and I’ve learned through enough unfortunate dress selections that gathers on my frame don’t do me any favors. I need all the structure I can get in a dress, so I use darts or pleats on everything. But my placement of the pleats on this one was a bit off. So, next time.

I was off work early today in honor of the holiday weekend and with two hours to fill before the first bus came, I figured I’d wander up to San Francisco’s fabric Mecca, Britex. Each time I go in there I am totally dazed by the sheer number of fabrics they have. So many colors, so many finishes and fibers, it’s like a candy store for a kid with a hippie mom. It’s also firmly out of my usual price range, so more often than not, I’m in there for a work-related project and I try not to look around too much for fear of finding something I love.

Today, I figured I’d splurge and get something. If not fabric, then maybe some buttons or buckles, some hard to find notion I’ve been looking for. I was ready.

And… meh. Really, meh. There were some nice, really soft Italian cottons and a few cool eyelets and seersuckers, but honestly, who pays $29.99 a yard for cotton?? I didn’t like it that much. Jesus.

I primarily sew because I’m a stumpy little midgety woman with a penchant for vintage clothes, but I also enjoy the frugal aspect of it. I was taught to sew by women who did it out of necessity, because store-bought clothes were expensive luxuries. So I just don’t feel right making a dress that costs 4 times what off the rack clothes would.

And what a learned today is that even if I was going to spend $30 a yard on fabric, Britex did not have anything that excited me enough to do so. It was all too modern and synthetic. Boring contemporary suitings and tacky silks. No thank you.

I still had some time to fill, so I decided to try and find Urban Burp, the vintage fabric store in North Beach. After struggling with a Yelp map that wasn’t working very well, I finally discovered them in the mezzanine of an office building. And… They were closed. Out for coffee for 5 minutes. Did I want to wait? Maybe. Looking through the window revealed that this place was significantly more up my alley than Britex, but I didn’t really feel like waiting and my bus was coming in 15 minutes, so I took it as a sign. Not today, Moe. Catch your bus and go buy some fun retro looking cotton calico for $2.99. You are a simple woman with humble tastes. Go buy something you won’t panic about cutting into or wearing to work. Go back to JoAnn’s. They’re even having a sale this weekend.

See? Happy.

I finally got around to making something out of the brown multi-colored polka-dot fabric I bought last month. I managed to find some more of it in a different store and bought another 3 yards. I now have enough fabric that I think I might make the matching jacket that goes with Advance 2878, which is the pattern I went with for this dress.

You may have noticed by now that when I like a pattern, I make several versions of it. Did you ever watch Mama’s Family when you were a kid? I always noticed that each character on that show had essentially one dress that just showed up over and over again in different fabrics. At the time, I assumed this was laziness on the part of the costume crew, but now I see how it was sort of brilliant in its accuracy. I think a lot of women are(were) like that, ending up with a closet full of the same dress in various fabrics. Since many patterns come with slight variations you can make, like sleeve length, neckline shapes, and skirt fullness, it seems like manufactures were onto this as well. Considering that home sewing was more of a cost-savings practice, it makes sense that women would want to get lots of mileage out of each pattern. They were spending $.65 on these things after all, gotta stretch those pennies! I have one pattern that I’ve made three dresses and two shirts out of so far, and still counting.

Posting pictures of mail order 4843 on facebook led to making another version of it for a fb friend. I generally don’t sew for profit as the amount of money I’d have to charge to make my work worthwhile would be prohibitive and frankly would make me feel silly. So when I sew for other people, it’s purely for the enjoyment of making something that I know the recipient will really love (though I charged her a nominal fee so I would feel a little more motivated to finish).

Mrs. Deardorff is a huge vintage enthusiast like myself and fairly close in size to me, so it seemed like a relatively easy and fun job to tackle. The challenges would be that 1) I’d have to size down her version of the dress a size and 2) she lives an hour and a half away from me, so I wouldn’t be able to do any fittings on her. Since it’s a fairly forgiving pattern, I figured it’s be ok it if was a little on the large size. I also didn’t pre-shrink the fabric so if it fits too big on her, she can shrink it in the dryer or hang dry if it fits fine (I use this trick on my own dresses most of the time).

I bought this pattern (Butterick 6832) with very high hopes. It has all of the cues I really love in a dress — buttons, cute collar, and a fitted skirt — but I was really bummed and confused when I saw that the measurements for an 18 1/2 where totally off from most patterns of this era that I’ve made. From what I can tell, this pattern is from the early-mid 60′s, a fact further evidenced by presence of a bit of old newspaper tacked onto a pattern piece that is dated 1966 ( love coming across little artifacts like this). While this may be one of my favorite years for movies, it seems like it might have been a bad omen for this pattern.

Since the sizing seemed a good two sizes smaller that I expected it to be, I decided to first make a muslin and adjust it to fit. I’m firmly in the “wearable” camp of muslin-making

I have been sewing up a storm lately, though you wouldn’t know it from my lack of posts about it. I guess it’s that thing about being too busy with life to stop and write about it. I took a bunch of photos today so hopefully there will be a bunch of new posts coming up.

I begin with what is now surely my new favorite. This is from a mail order pattern (4843) that I’ve had for at least a year and never got around to making. I think I worried that it would be too shapeless and dumpy. It is decidedly a lose and comfy house dress, but it’s not nearly and potato-sacky as I worried it would me. I think if I made it a touch smaller, or just didn’t pre-shrink the fabric beforehand, it would fit a little closer. But other than that, I really have no complaints.

I made it out of this reproduction blue diamond fabric I bought a ridiculously long time ago,

Two years ago, I bought the absolute greatest vintage swim suit on ebay. it was black (slimming!) with little checkered ribbon details. It had a a kind of triangular bodice (I’m sure there’s a technical term for this, but words fail me) with a little skirt that hid many embarrassments. And it fit perfectly. I LOVED it.

About 6 months ago I noticed it had gone missing. I kept thinking it would show up in a suitcase or drawer bottom somewhere, but it never did. I still held out some kind of hare-brained hope that it would surface — until this morning, when I suddenly remembered a very cold and disappointing hot tub my husband and I endured at the Embassy Suites in Parsippany, NJ. I had blocked the whole thing out of my mind, it was such a short-lived and unpleasant soak, that it never dawned on me that I might have left my suit there. Not the hot tub, mind you. I’m no whore. But in the bathroom of the hotel room, hanging up to dry. This was almost a year ago now, so it’s a very long shot that they still have it in their lost and found. I might still call to check though…

But here’s the happy ending part (well, adjacent happy ending).

I was reading a great post from Male Pattern Boldness this morning about brand-loyalty and fashion trends, and it reminded me about this one particular trend that is going on right now that I find so completely baffling to the point of anger: ridiculously high-heeled shoes.

Ever since Carrie Bradshaw started teetering around New York in her Jimmy Choos, women have been subjected to (pursuing?) higher and higher heels in their shoes. When the heel couldn’t get any higher, they started adding platforms to make them go higher. And recently, I’ve started seeing a particularly insane version of this shoe with a platform so high and so out of place that is looks like they wearer might have some kind of developmental problem and one leg is shorter than the other.

I did a little research and one of the perpetrators of this crime against women and fashion is Christian Louboutin. So not only are these shoes horrendously ugly, impractical and dangerous to walk in, but they are fucking expensive too.

I finally had a free moment to document the dress I made this last weekend. This week has been nuts, so after a long day of crazy deadlines at work (all successfully met), I’m celebrating by standing in the kitchen like a robot. Now you get the delightful treat of my haggard, beatific-zombie face to pair with this lovely new dress.

My long-awaited pattern, Advance 2878, finally arrived in the mail in time for my weekend sewing. What I couldn’t tell in the eBay photos is that it has a zipper up the back, which is a feature I irrationally dislike in most dresses. A side zipper is just so much more discrete and easy to navigate. Sure, a nice long zipper makes stepping into a dress nice and easy, but it never seems worth it for the marring of the back of a dress. Conversely, and nonsensically, I love a front zipper on a dress. Has to be a house dress though, but I digress.

I sewed all day and finished a new dress! based on the Advance pattern below. I’m too tired to a formal post, but there should be one tomorrow. Yay!