18 January

In future I'll try to post each entry on the day I actually wrote it, but since I'm playing "catch-up" I'll post these three in quick succession :)
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18 January

I started work on my recital dress today!  

This has been in the planning stages for, oh, months and months, when I decided I'd rather make my dress than buy it.  

I'm drawing my main inspiration from the gorgeous black dress Rosemary Clooney wears in "White Christmas" when she sings "Love, you didn't do right by me" in the club.  

I've always loved this dress; it's elegant, flattering, and I love that it makes the most of her curves instead of trying to hide them.  I like that in a dress.  But I never knew how to make the skirt, and it's really the skirt that makes this dress.

Then I remembered that Vogue pattern I'd bought on sale a while back.  (Vogue 2931.)  I dug it out; it was perfect.  Exactly the right shape.  But the bodice was totally different, and totally wrong for me.  I came close to shelving the idea.  

Then it occurred to me that I could combine two patterns, to get the bodice and the skirt that I wanted.  So I started hunting for a compatible bodice.

I'm honestly not sure how the original dress is constructed - black does a really good job of camouflaging seams, and the detail isn't great in 1950s movies.  But the skirt pattern had eight panels, and I thought princess seams would work well with that.  It would also give a smooth, continuous line, instead of chopping up the waist with a seam.  I had trouble finding a princess-seamed dress that had the right number of pieces, until I remembered an old McCalls pattern I had, which I'd made up once and been fairly pleased with.  All I had to do was cut the centre front in two pieces instead of on the fold, and it would be perfect.  I had my patterns.

I'm using black, 100% cotton velvet, lined with black as well.  I'll have netting for stiffener in the lower half of the skirt (as I don't think velvet will hold that shape by itself!  I'm also planning to make an interlining of the bodice, down over the hips, from a stiff old cotton we've got loads of.  I'm not sure exactly what it is - a lightweight canvas, or really heavy muslin? - but it's great for stablizing.  I'll bone this, for added fitting and smoothing.  I've played with the idea of adding bra cups, so that I wouldn't have to worry about cutting the back V to work with my underwear, or about finding a bra that would work - but I'm not sure it would offer enough support.  So this step is only possible, as yet!

To prepare my pattern, I chopped the top of the Vogue pattern off at the waistline, then did the same to the McCall - then carefully matched the waistlines of the two patterns and taped them together.  Incredibly, they were almost an exact match; I only had to "borrow" from one piece to add to another once.  When I get this fine-tuned, I'll disassemble the toile and trace off the corrected pattern before I cut out the actual fabric.

The patterns spliced together and laid out for cutting.

I cut my first toile out of my parent's old comforter cover.  (This, owing to a cat getting locked in their bedroom over Christmas, was unusable as bedding in spite of treatment and washing, but it works for mockups!)  I deconstructed it, removing 11 buttons and the upholstry cording that was inside the piping, and it yielded more than enough fabric to cut out this mockup.

That's as far as I got this first day.  We'll see when I baste it together, how my cobbled-together pattern worked out!