Birds of a Feather dress

Yay! It’s vintage patterns month!! I do love sewing with vintage patterns. 😀

Right, here’s my first creation for September – the Birds of a Feather dress, made using two 1940’s patterns. The bodice was made from Bestway C.493, a cute pattern from sometime in the 1940’s, and the skirt was from Simplicity 4649 from 1941. (I decided to be ‘lazy’ and splice the patterns together since I had to grade the Bestway one out at the waist and didn’t want to do the math required to get the pleats evenly spaced again. Heh.)

Fabric is some lovely lightweight, floaty, silky feeling synthetic-unknown-fiber-thing that I picked up in the massive Fabric Warehouse sale a couple of years back for the huge sum of $3 per meter. (Gotta love a bargain like that!) It’s been hanging around, waiting to be turned into a dress ever since. Clearly, it was waiting for this Bestway pattern to enter my stash, courtesy of Bea as part of the Sew Weekly Reunion swap. (Thanks, Bea!)

After some initial head-scratching, this pattern was lovely to put together, and aside from the afore-mentioned waist grading out (note to self: eat less chocolate. Or just enjoy life and carry on grading out waists of patterns. Hmmm… I think I’ll go with option ‘b’. 😉 ), it fit out of the envelope. I did alter it down the front though – with the original pattern, the bodice fastens with snap fasteners, but the fastenings end just past the slightly-dropped waist. I extended it instead, and made it a shirt dress. Although I still kept the snap fasteners part of the sewing instructions, and used pearl snaps, with a couple of small vintage silver snaps hand-sewn on the inside to prevent any gapeage.

Just for fun, I added contrast green piping. And cut the fabric on a different angle for the centre bodice panels so the feathers go a different way.

Overall, I may be a bit in love with this dress. It’s floaty and lovely to wear, can be layered over warmer things (such as the pink merino top I’m wearing in the photos) for winter, but will also be lovely by itself in summer. And, you know, it’s got feathers on it, which automatically makes it super awesome. 😉

There are some more details over on my blog, if you’re interested.)