1-hour dress, lawn party edition

I've been so busy sewing and attending events this spring that I am falling WAY behind on blogging about my projects.  But before too much time passes, I wanted to share a few notes about a new 1-hour 1920's dress that I made for the Jazz Age Sunday Social at the end of March.

For this dress, I started with my Dowonton Abby 1-hour dress pattern but made a few modifications so the two dresses wouldn't look exactly alike.  I shortened the waist to remove the side gathers in the torso, slightly shortened the skirt, and created pleats at the hips instead of gathered swags.  I also shortened the sleeves a little and added a rounded neckline.  I created a pattern of this new dress so you can better see how small modifications to the basic 1-hour dress pattern can give you lots of variation in styles.

The other major difference is that I used some soft cotton plaid  to create a casual day-dress version instead of the slinky silk velvet that I picked for the Downton Abby dress.  You can see that the cotton dress is much less body hugging, and that combined with a slightly wider skirt means that the dress has a bit of a flare thanks to the stiffer drape of the fabric.  I don't mind that since I wanted something more casual for the picnic, plus a lot of these early 20's dresses had more fabric in the skirts than you would expect. But I thought it was fun to see the difference that fabric can make.

 

I think the hardest part about this whole project was deciding how to decorate it, and I spent more hours looking through fashion plates for design ideas than I spent sewing the dress.  In the end, I started running short on time so I finished it very simply with a contrast binding around the neck, a narrow belt, and a pair of long bows all made out of bias strips of scrap fabric.  This isn't a direct copy of one dress or fashion plate, but I had seen enough similar elements in various 1920's illustrations - like the ones seen on the fabulous What I Found blog - that I felt like it would be a plausible choice.

The best part about 1920's fashions are the hats, so I was thrilled to have an excuse to steal one of my husband's old straw garden hats and reblock it into a wide-brimmed cloche.  To do this, I removed the sweatband inside of the crown, completely wet the straw, then stretched it over a wooden hat block.  If you don't have a hat block, you could also reshape a hat like this on a styrofoam head that is used for holding wigs, and you can wrap thick towels over any type of head form to make the crown wider, which is very used for 20's styles.  After I left the re-blocked hat to dry overnight, I then cut down the brim so it was much shorter in the back and widest on the sides.  Finally, I stiffened the edge of the brim with thick jewelry wire (I ran out of millinery wire, but this works nearly as good) and covered the wire with a strip of straw braid that I removed from the edge of the original hat.  The decorations are made with bias strips of silk and a vintage mother-of-pearl buckle that a friend gave me.

So that's pretty much it.  It's nothing fancy, but it was quick and easy and all of the materials came from my stash, and that's always a good thing.  And once again, I bet you are wondering if it really took one hour to make, right?  Well... it was more like three hours this time because I didn't want to top-stitch all of the binding, and figuring out the pleat size in the skirt slowed me down a bit.  But that's still not half bad!  If you are interested, more photos can be found from my event album on flickr.

Downton-esque 1-hour dress

Last weekend, the Dallas / Ft. Worth Costumers Guild held a Tiaras and Top Hats Tea Party, and since I am a complete Downton Abbey addict, I decided to make an early 20's dress and indulge my inner Countess for the day.  

I had a little less than 2 yards of voided silk velvet that I bought from Fabrique's remnant bin earlier in the year, and this was just enough fabric to make a simple sheath dress.  I played around with some more complicated pattern options at first, but the fabric was so pretty on its own that I decided to keep it really simple and experiment with the infamous 1-hour dress concept that was so popular during this decade.  There are a couple of fun books from 1924-1925 that talk about making these dresses and give lots of variations on how they can be put together, so if you are interested in learning more, I've included links to those books at the bottom of my blog post.  But since the shapes are really simple, I thought I'd also give you my own freebie pattern so you can see exactly how my dress was made.  (here is the full-sized version if you need it)

The cool thing about the 1-hour dress is that it is made out of mostly rectangular pieces and just pinned on the body to fit, so it is incredibly easy to draft and make.  The front and back pieces are exactly the same, and I went one step further by using a boat neck on my gown which also eliminated any need for a curved neckline.  These dresses don't look like much when they are laid out flat, but it's amazing how they come to life once they are on the body.  On the right you can see my dress before I cut the angle at the hips, which I did last because I wanted to check the draping before I cut.  

The only real shaping in the dress comes at the hip, which is gathered a little on the torso seam to make some soft folds at the waistline, and then it is gathered at the side extensions to give some fullness over the hips.  I made the hip extensions on my dress slant down, which draws up the sides and gives it a slightly curved hemline and some diagonal draping across the skirt.  I also made two looped sashes out of silk georgette and tacked these onto the hips to jazz it up a little more.   

I'm not going to do a full step-by-step tutorial because I think the books cover that well enough if you need more instructions.  But here are a few more of my own impression after making one of these dresses myself:

- I think one of the main reasons why my dress was successful was because of my fabric choice.  You definitely want a fabric that is very fluid and not stiff for this style - something like silk velvet, crepe, soft lawn, etc.  Drapey is definitely good!

- I made my dress quite narrow through the body, which keeps it from looking like a big shapeless sack.  It only has 2" of ease across the bust, and it is just big enough to fit over my shoulders, but just barely.  This narrow width also means that the waistline naturally falls at my high hip (around where I wear my jeans) since it can't go down any farther than that.  This is perfect for an early 20's look, and to my eyes, it is a lot more attractive than the later 20's dresses.  Many of those have a waistline that hits lower on the hips, which results in the whole body needing to be cut wider for us curvy gals.  

- The one part about this dress that I wasn't crazy about is that the neckline likes to shift around a lot because the fabric is so slippery.  I tried to combat that by sewing snaps into the shoulders and snapping it to my chemise, but it still moved more than I wanted, so I'll probably try snapping it to a firmly fitted 1920's brassiere next time.  

- So did the dress really only take one hour to make?  Uhhh... no.  But that's mainly because the silk velvet forced me to baste everything before sewing, and I took the time to hand-finish all the hems and bind the internal seams.  I probably spent about 4-5 hours on it total.  But if I was making this sort of dress in cotton and machine sewed all the finishing work, I think I could get pretty close to that 1-hour timeframe. 

- And just because I am totally in love with my new tiara, I thought I'd let you know that I bought it from Venus Jewelry on ebay.  I think it is a pretty great match for the type of tiara that Cora wears in the latest season of Downton Abbey.  One of the best parts about 20's fashions is all the fabulous jewelry from that era, and I had a ton of fun picking out sparkly things to finish off my outfit!  I wish I had a better non-blurry picture, but maybe you can get the basic idea here.  

So that's pretty much it!  We had a wonderful time at the tea party, and I am even more in love with 20's fashions than I was before. If you ever need a quick and easy frock for your own Downton Abby adventures, I definitely recommend that you give the 1-hour dress a try!