“You can never go wrong with a little pink… a lot works for me.” Dana Dalgetty
It is extremely difficult for me to resist a bubblegum pink fabric. And if it is a stripe, too, the odds are very good that fabric will end up in my sewing room. So it was with this silk and cotton blend found on the website of Mendel Goldberg Fabrics.
I purchased it last summer during a 20% off sale, and when it arrived, I knew I had made the right decision – although the stripes were a bit bolder in person than I anticipated. As usual, I wasn’t sure what I was going to make – a coat? a dress? a skirt? I needed more thinking time so I tucked it away until this Spring. In the meantime, I purchased this vintage Vogue pattern which I saw as a good basic design which could be easily changed, adapted and altered.
I like dress designs which have some “back“ interest, here the buttoned half belt. Although I loved the sleeveless view, I have become less comfortable wearing sleeveless dresses as I have gotten older. Thus, I was drawn to the short-sleeved view (C), knowing I could easily lengthen the sleeves to reach almost to the elbow, if that seemed the way to go. Thus, it was a logical progression to imagine the pink striped fabric made up in this design, despite the note on the pattern “Not suitable for striped fabrics.”
I wasn’t quite ready to forge ahead, however. My fabric was such a bold stripe, I feared a horizontal orientation of the fabric would be too much, but a vertical orientation was equally problematic. I went to my Pinterest feed to get some inspiration and in no time at all, the lightbulb went off in my head. The dress needed a combination horizontal and vertical orientation. I made this quick sketch, and I knew I had the solution I needed.
I set about making a muslin/toile for fitting, and then I hit a brick wall. Those curved darts you see on the pattern bodice just were not flattering to me, despite my working and reworking them multiple times. I finally gave up. I would need to find a substitute pattern for the bodice front and make it work with the bodice back toile which I had fitted successfully. This was all terribly time-consuming, as you can imagine, but I finally was able to find an existing bodice front in my stash of patterns/toiles which, fingers crossed, would work. I didn’t know how well it would work until I had the happy surprise of seeing the darts feed into the bold stripes successfully.
What was not as successful was the proper alignment of the buttons on the back belt to the center of the dress. That is one of the many downsides of fitting oneself – I could not see what I was doing, and although I measured and fiddled, I was still off by a couple of inches.
I lined the entire dress with a soft cotton batiste which complimented the softness of my fabric, adding a little more opaqueness to the finished dress. I did not use an underlining, reasoning that more structure would not be conducive to the soft flow I wanted in this garment.
A word here about the panel for the hem. Wow, was I tight on fabric! I thought the panel should feature one bold pink stripe, bordered by “half” white stripes. I barely had enough fabric to make this happen, and because the width of the skirt was just a bit bigger than the width of the fabric, I had to piece that panel. Whew, I just made it. Here is all the fabric I had left over:
I was able to wear this dress for two events in May, feeling perfectly dressed for both of them.
And that little bit of left-over fabric? I had plans for that, too, which I will share in a future post.
fiftydresses 