Why math is important: A 20s dress

I've pledged to make 2-3 things for my vintage pledge. One is this 20s dress gleaned from Loran's World's Art of the 20s dress challenge.

Update: Loran got it from The Midvale Cottage Post (specifically this post, but check out all the amazing 1920s stuff at that first link); I thought I had the original source can't believe I didn't click through. The pattern is from Ruth Wyeth Spears.


It's not a terribly useful dress, but it's oh so pretty. Chiffon. Floaty. I kept thinking this dress was familiar from somewhere...

It's kind of like the dresses in the "Beautiful Girl" scene from Singing in the Rain.

I had no real plans to make this dress, though. I mean... I have a vaguely 20s dress already, and how many does one need in the not-1920s?



Apparently, one needs more than one.

I made this dress in time for Electroswing back in March, but didn't get around to taking proper photos until the Gatsby Garden Party at Spadina House this past Sunday. There are a few mistakes in the instructions, by the way, so read on if you'd like to see how I dealt with them. Skip ahead if you want to see more pictures of the dress and a few of the Gatsby party.

Gotta love a pattern that starts with "Start with a plain foundation slip of soft silk." Yes, well. That's helpful. Fortunately, American Duchess has our back. She also posted a 20s pattern for a gathered slip, but I chose to keep it fairly simple. One of the comments suggested measuring the hips while sitting down so it doesn't bind; very useful for dancing. I added two inches ease to my sitting hip measurement. That might have been a bit too much; the resulting dress feels very wide. I have to say, though, that whether dancing, cycling, and sitting down for a picnic, the dress was super comfortable.


I left it unhemmed until I had attached the chiffon skirt pieces; I wound up hemming it to just below the knee.

I had the guy at Affordable Textiles cut the chiffon into 1-yard lengths, and in so doing we discovered that it tears really easily on the cross-grain, too. Which was excellent, because I needed to further cut each length down to 1-yard widths and wasn't looking forward to the no-doubt jagged cuts that would result if I used scissors. Serendipity is excellent.

Anyway, if you read the... pattern? instructions? then you see that it suggests hemming by stitching close to the edge and then whip-stitching by hand to imitate machine picot. Well, 36" x 4 x 6 + whatever the neckline is an awful lot of inches to be hand sewing. And honestly? I have a machine that, as it turns out, can do machine picot. So...

A quick Google of "machine picot stitch hem" did not yield useful photos, but did give me this great tutorial. Essentially, you are using a long zigzig stitch and a rolled hem foot. Gotta tell you, I'm kind of in love with this hem.^*

A trick for doing the corners: use the end threads of the first side as the starting threads for the next side of the square, but make sure the last stitch of the first side is close the edge of the fabric or it will be tricky to start the roll. And I have no idea how to say that in a less-confusing way. Sorry.


I used the silver embroidery thread that is not at all useful for attaching buttons but really makes this pop.

You might notice the marking the neckline part is lacking in helpful instructions. I measured the distance between the straps on the underslip while I was wearing it to get the width and then basically pinned the folded bodice in place while I figure out how low I wanted the front to go, which wound up being about 3" below the shoulder. I used a tonne of pins to keep everything from moving around, folded the bodice in half widthwise, put more pins in, marked the neckline using a French curve, put yet more pins on both sides of the curve, held my breath, and cut. I stay-stitched the neckline before doing the picot hem. Then I repeated the marking and pinning on the back with a 1" depth.

To attach the bodice to the shoulder straps invisibly, I put the top and back pieces right sides together, pinned them to the straps on the back side so that the front piece hung wrong side out over the back, and stitched.


When you flip the front piece over, voila! Invisible tacking.


So far, so good. The bodice should be the hardest part and the skirt should go on easy-peasy, right?

Sort of. Here's where there seems to be a mistake and also where my many years of high-level math education come in handy.

The instructions say to fold the top of each skirt piece diagonally over 19". Except that if you remember your Pythagorean theorem, you'll know that the diagonal of a 36" square is 51" — the details will be left as an exercise for the reader — so folding the top over 19" leaves the bottom edge at 32". That's my inseam, by the way. Not what I was going for — although a 20s dinner dress would reach the ground, it's clearly not what the drawing is showing. And looks not good.



As an aside: that 19" would bring the first fold to my knees. On the diagram, the under layer seems to be about 3" longer — at any rate, when I was playing around with the layers, that's what looked best to my eye — and it is a trivial exercise for the reader to work out that a 41" diagonal goes with an approximate 29" square. So if you want to make this dress and have it knee length as in the picture, you will need 6 squares of chiffon: 2 36" squares for the bodice and 4 29" squares for the skirt. This would also reduce the overall bulk in the skirt — the poor woman in the diagram has no hips so the skirt hangs straight down, but swishy and floaty as it was, I felt like there was just too much of a good thing.

I did want it knee length, but was I going to cut the chiffon pieces smaller and rehem them? Hell, no. I folded the diagonal over to 24", leaving the bottom at 27". It's a bit longer than I'd like, but at least it's not dragging on the ground, right? Attaching the skirt panels is straightforward; the hardest part is keeping all the excess chiffon out of the way.

I sewed the top of the girdle (more underslip fabric) to the dress and left it loose at the bottom (the DC generously donated his catch-stitching skills since I was in the middle of curling my hair because of course I left the girdle until the last minute). I was thinking of adding pleats, but decided to add hooks at the side closure so I could keep it tight and artfully fold the girdle (and cover up the icky seaming underneath). It bunches a bit at the side, but the chiffon covers it up nicely.



I'm fairly pleased with the end product. I should have put the underslip straps closer together; the chiffon tends to slide over the shoulders and make the whole thing look really wide. I also managed to snag the chiffon on my purse, which caused that weird pucker that I didn't notice until I saw the pictures on my laptop. Alas.





The slightest breeze lifts the whole thing like I've got Gene Kelly and his giant fan.


I never thought I'd say this about chiffon, but there's just too much fabric going on. Maybe it's the wind. Maybe I just need to sew the top along the shoulder straps so it stops overwhelming my shoulders. And maybe I'll take the skirt panels off and cut them down after all.

However. For Electroswing, I went with a faux-bob, 20s style and tried to do 20s-style makeup.


I tried to follow this tutorial, but she uses MAC makeup and only lists the fancy colour name instead of the actual colour, so I was making some educated guesses.


For my hair, I sort of followed this video, except that the time between watching and doing was about a week so I forgot the bit where you pin the curls up while they cool, so my waves were a bit softer than I'd have liked.

I actually got a crap-tonne of hair cut off a few days before, so this process wasn't quite as onerous as it might have been.

For the Gatsby party, I again went with my trusty straw hat. I covered the band with more of the underslip fabric. To cover the the seam, I wound the extra left over from one of the shoulder straps around the band and tacked it on.


There's not a whole lot to do at the garden party if you don't bring a picnic, which we did. Fortunately, we ran across some of our friends who provided excellent 1920s picnic ambiance:


G's working gramophone brought all the Ministers for Aboriginal Affairs to our yard.


So yay, first vintage pledge achieved. I might make the knit dress that wasn't vintage when I bought the pattern in the 80s but it is now. I was also thinking of making a 1940s crochet sweater, but I probably won't this year. I might make another pair of Smooth Sailing trousers, though.



I'm in a whiiiiiiiiiiirl....


^*This was, alas, after trying to follow the instructions and machine stitch a straight edge followed by a zig-zag overcast, then trying my overcast stitch. No doubt a whipstich would have looked better than those, but I'm happy I used the google-fu and picoted away.