Making a 1960s Dress – McCall's 6146

I found this pattern on sale on Etsy back in May and I couldn't pass up the opportunity. Although the design is simple, I liked it and thought I could always use it as a base to make a more elaborate dress.

This was the first time I was using a pattern from McCall's, but I didn't see a notable difference from a Simplicity pattern.

Fabric and notions bought. I'm making View A which is the green dress.

Bodice

The bodice went pretty well. I don't have a lot to talk about except for the rickrack on the neckline and the sleeves.

The instructions told to sew the rickrack and the facing at the same time, as in the picture above... Two seconds in and I knew it'd be impossible to sew both pieces while aiming right in the middle of the rickrack. So I turned to the method used when putting on the rickrack on the dress Simplicity 4270.

First, I sewed the facing as pictured, then flipped it and stitched the rickrack on the seam line.

Just needed to press the facing towards the inside and the rickrack was done.

And now for the sleeves. When I realized that I could've used the same method to put the rickrack on the hems, I had already folded them on the inside and sewed them (thus couldn't place the rickrack on the pressed fold). I didn't want to unsew both hems, so I tried different combos (side of the fabric + superposition of the rickrack) to find the best one to stitch the rickrack.

It took a few tries to find which combination gave the best result (see picture above). Of course, for the next time I sew rickrack on the sleeves, I'll sew it on a fold I'll have pressed beforehand.

Bodice done ✨ Absolutely love the rickrack that adds simple detailing

(Note: The sleeves were sewed at 3/4" instead of 5/8".)

Skirt

The skirt was supposed to be gathered, but because of my last gathering experience with this kind of fabric, I knew I didn't want to gather this one. However, I wasn't sure what to replace the gathers with and had been pondering over what to do since the beginning of the project.

I got inspired by vintage dresses on Etsy and settled on narrow pleats of 1.5 cm wide. I followed instructions on how to make a pleated skirt on wikiHow. According to the article, if I wanted 1.5 cm pleats, I had to mark my fabric every 3 cm and then fold.

I must've done something wrong because the method described didn't work for me. I never understood what I had done wrong exactly, but when I folded the pleats, I wouldn't have 1.5 cm pleats.

There was a gif at Creating the Pleats presenting how to fold them, but it only showed one pleat being folded and it wasn't very clear to me. I didn't understand the following gif either (though now I do get it—only too late).

Otherwise, I had found that when I folded pleats on 1.5 cm marks, it really gave me 1.5 cm pleats, so I just made marks every 1.5 cm instead of every 3 cm.

Marking the pleats and then folding them

It's a very large skirt (the amount of gathering would've been huge!), so I was lucky to be able to wrap it fully around my waist with only half of the skirt pleated.

I wasn't quite satisfied with the pleats after stitching them...

They were notably thin. It looked all wobbly.

Something had evidently gone wrong, so I decided to unsew all of the pleats and moved on to another strategy. I found this blog post on making pleats and the explanation was interesting. At that time, I had decided to make even more narrow pleats of 0.25".

The calculations in the blog post didn't work for me (the total length of fabric I would've needed with a 25" waist was 37.5"...), but I had found the drawing of the pleats extremely helpful. It made me understand the concept of these kinds of pleats, which is that one pleat is three layers thick. No wonder why my first set looked all flimsy—the pleats' layers were all irregular.

So I decided to make 0.25" pleats, making sure to take three layers of fabric for each pleat.

I could sense this would take long...

Finally! I made more folds than needed, just to be safer.

The process was tiresome, but it went well. I decided to ditch any calculations for now and adjust the waist later when the skirt would be attached to the bodice. I thought it would be easy to just remove the excess pleats at the end, but with a skirt band added later on, it wasn't that easy.

The pleats stitched

These pleats also seem to be standing on only one layer of fabric,

but they're in fact stitched on three layers.

Looking back, I'm not sure whether ignoring my waist measurements while pleating the skirt was the best idea, because I ended up with a lot of altering to do for the bodice and the skirt at the same time.
I think I should've first determined how tight I wanted the bodice to be, make the skirt pleats and calculate the waist basing myself on the bodice measurements specified beforehand, and finally, join the skirt to the bodice.

I tried to attach the skirt to the bodice, but the pleats were making the whole thing unstable, so as instructed, I made a skirt band.

The skirt band made the process a wee bit longer, but it was worth it.

It was much easier to pin the skirt to the bodice.

It also made it easier to ease the skirt.

After joining the skirt to the bodice, the fun began. I had to sew the zipper, but first, I had to know how much I'd need to remove at the bodice and the skirt.

Everything at the pin's right is much fabric I have to remove for both edges at the bodice

I pressed each edge of the bodice according to the pin's position, tried the bodice back on, and I don't know what kind of witchcraft occurred, but it was way too tight; as if I'd actually only need to press 5/8" from the edges instead of something like 3".

I'm not sure how I managed to measure the bodice so differently from the first to the second time. I just know that it's hard to measure yourself properly at the back, especially when you want to make the bodice tight. Again, I think measuring the bodice and the skirt separately would've been preferable, but it was too late when I acknowledged it.

Anyway, I cut the extra fabric at each side of the bodice according to this 5/8" measurement and adjusted the skirt consequently.

Look at all that extra fabric at each side of the skirt...

Cutting all excess took quite a while because there was the skirt band covering the pleats, but I was mostly happy to finally remove this big bulk of fabric and not having to carry it around anymore.

The two unpleated parts on each side of the skirt are for the zipper.

Then I pinned the zipper and tried the dress on. However, it was too loose. What the heck. (◴◡◶) So I repinned the zipper and tried the dress three times until I got the right measurements on the fourth. Guess how much extra fabric I had removed at the bodice? Pretty much the same amount as when I had pinned it the first time... Ugh, I had basically come back to square one after taking a longer path.

Anyway, I proceeded to sew the zipper, and when trying to zip it up, it went berserk and a bubble formed while I was zipping up the waist. I think it was because of the thickness of the fabric there and how close it was sewed to the zipper teeth—though it worked fine when it was pinned only.

My mom tried to help me get the zipper back to normal, but to no avail. We finally had to remove the zipper and it became broken. So I had busted the zipper and had way too much fabric at the bodice and the skirt... noice.

Two days later, I tackled the zipper a second time with a navy blue one of better quality (the fabric store we went to was a different one and didn't have any dark red zippers.)

Instead of establishing the zipper position by myself, I asked my mom to pin the back of my bodice and waist. I just wanted the job to be well-done this time.

You can see in the picture below how much fabric I folded from the edges. It varies a lot; I folded a lot at the bust but barely at the waist. Also, flunking my first zipper was perhaps a good thing because I had forgotten to put interfacing the first time.

After sewing the zipper, I was relieved to see it worked correctly. I only had to stitch it a second time, nearer to the zipper teeth because the navy colour of the zipper showed a lot when the dress was worn. It shows less now, though you can see a bit of black interfacing if you come near... oops.

Once the zipper was done, my mom helped me make the hem of the skirt, closed the little hole at the bottom of the zipper—that little spot the sewing machine can't access—and sewed a hook-and-eye closure at the top back of the dress.

Then the dress was finished. (•̀ᴗ•́)و Well, almost... there was the belt that was left to make. The pattern piece for the belt was included and I had even cut the fabric, but my mom and I thought that a navy belt would look better, so we decided to look for one.

Here's the dress completed:

Just thought I'd expose some imperfections...

I tightened the bust so much that the middle of the neckline doesn't stay flat. It lifts up a bit.

I did make the bust tight on purpose, but I didn't expect the neckline to do this weird thing.

The thread at the seam of the sleeves' hem is bunched up and the rickrack looks worn out.

The edges of the bodice don't align... thankfully there'll be a belt.

At the left, you can also see a patch that my mom added after accidentally

poking a hole with the seam zipper when unsewing the zipper.

Besides these flaws, I'm satisfied with this dress. And while shopping, my mom found at Ardene the perfect dark red belt to go with it. It's even prettier than a navy blue one.

My conclusions following this project:

• I'm never doing a back zipper again on a tight dress (except for justified reasons), not only because they're harder to zip up, but also because taking the measurements back there was impossible for me.
• I'll try to define the measurements of the skirt waist before joining it to the bodice, otherwise, I'm in it for the long haul.
• I insisted on making the dress very tight at the bust, but in retrospect, I should've left more ease at the underarms to allow my arms to raise comfortably.

Apart from this, I absolutely love the pleats and am glad that I decided to remake them. They were worth the time and I'll definitely do 0.25" pleats again in the future.

Making a 1950s Two-Piece Set – Simplicity 1888

Okay... I'm writing this blog post for the second time since I accidentally deleted its content while working on it and though I hadn't saved the changes when I went back to my Posts page, Blogger acted as if I had (probably that darn automatic save).
I had included lots of valuable information (to me) in this post as I had again made mistakes and wanted to avoid them for the next time. Unfortunately, some of this precious info isn't in this second version because I forgot about it (it's been a really GOOD while since I started to work on this set.)

Anyway, this post is about making a two-piece set using the pattern Simplicity 1888. And it's a take two because I've already attempted this set before, only to finally give up after I accidentally made a hole in the fabric near the collar (while being already fed up with the fabric I had badly chosen).

Fabric and notions bought—I'm making View 1.

The fabric is from Magasin Comeau. I talked a little about my first visit here.

Close-up of the fabric

Making the bodice went very well, notably because I had already made it using the previous fabric. The difference here was that the fabric was much more pleasant to work with. The white pencil glid smoothly which made the process of making the darts and tucks so much easier.

Can you notice the dumb mistake I made?

Answer: The way I sewed both back pieces (the two pieces you see on each side) ended up with the front being inverted. This means that the seams of the front darts and tucks are showing when they shouldn't (while the seams of the tucks on the back pieces are okay).

I had just finished the hem of the sleeves when I found out about it. I couldn't believe I had actually tried the bodice a couple of times before and had never remarked this.

At that moment I had two choices to repair my mistake:

• Deconstruct an X number of bodice parts to resew the back pieces to the front the right way.
• Avoid deconstructing the bodice and unsew the front darts and tucks to remake them on the other side of the fabric.

I chose the first option even though deconstructing what I had just built was mental torture. I just feared that the second option would give a botched result.

I actually had to unsew every piece of the bodice. Nevertheless, I didn't regret my choice.

Everything was now where it had to be and as if I hadn't made any mistakes.

Now, for the rickrack below the collar... I thought I was smart by using white thread on top and navy thread on the bottom until I realized midway that the navy thread was visible.

Obviously, I restarted everything with white thread on top and bottom.

Bodice finally finished! I sewed the bottom sleeves and the sides at 3/4" instead of 5/8" to make it tighter. Here are the front and back:

My mom sewed the buttons and a snap at the collar.

Because I wasn't going to attach the skirt to the bodice (and make a dress), I thought that the skirt would be a walk in the park, but I hit a couple of walls making it.

First, the instructions told to sew the skirt sections together before putting on the skirt trim (this wasn't the hard part by the way lol.)

Cutting the skirt trim after joining the skirt sections

The instructions also said to join the skirt trims together before sewing it as a big "onion ring" on the skirt. I thought that was a bit weird, so I sewed the skirt trims individually. Because the skirt sections had already been joined, I had to unsew the seams where each section met to put the trim "inside", then join back the sections. See the picture below to understand better...

Very ugly, but fortunately barely noticeable when the skirt is worn

I don't think the strategy I went for was the best, but I learned from it. Also, I had tried to eyeball the position of the trims but had failed at some places (so had to unsew and resew). I had aligned the trims based on a horizontal line on the fabric, but I didn't see that the line was going downwards therefore wasn't reliable at all...

While I was unsewing, I noticed that the skirt pattern actually had dotted lines

 to indicate where to put the skirt trim, so the mistake could have been avoided... ugh.

Onto stitching the two rickrack trims on the skirt. Because I had had difficulties in the past with the rickrack, I kind of dreaded this step. However, instead of pinning the rickrack on the fabric, I decided to try something new and make marks with the white pencil 1/2" from the skirt trim, as instructed. Then I joined the marks with a ruler and a pencil so that I'd have a straight line to place my rickrack on.

You can see at the bottom the white line I traced beforehand.

(I was taking a picture, but normally I had both of my hands holding the rickrack firmly.)

Sewing both rickracks with this method went like a charm and I was very satisfied with the result.

My euphoria didn't last long because making the gathers was a nightmare. It took me about seven attempts because the thread kept breaking off. I even used a thicker thread, but it still snapped. Then I realized that you had to pull on only one of the threads (not both the top and bottom threads) in order to gather...

Sewing the skirt band was also challenging because the gathers were all bunched up. Trying to sew a straight line on this thickness was near-impossible. The result was, as expected, atrocious:

And the overall aspect of the skirt wasn't as encouraging.

The skirt looked as bad when worn as in the picture above. I didn't wear a petticoat underneath, but even if I did I don't think that it would have improved the look.

I believe I would've given up on this pattern again if the bodice wouldn't have fit. However, I had found when trying on the set that would the skirt be pleated, it'd make a really nice ensemble. Thus I decided to deconstruct some parts of the skirt to replace the gathers with pleats.

I used the skirt pattern from Simplicity 4270 to make the pleats. Even though the pattern wasn't tailored to the skirt I was working with, I didn't want to fuss with calculating new pleat widths and just made the same ones. The result was so much cleaner and better:

Sewing the skirt band went also extremely well compared to when the skirt was gathered

I'm still wondering why the pattern asked for gathers. I guess that they work if you use lighter fabric, but now I know that I shall stay away from them when using stiffer fabric.

One thing left to fix was the waist that was too big for me. I talked about it with my mom and proposed to fold some fabric over the pleats to make the skirt tighter and secure everything with a snap. What I hadn't realized was that more than one snap would be required. After placing the first snap, my mom told me that we'd need a second snap, and when the first and second snaps were sewed, my mom explained that adding a third snap would be best to make the lump look flatter (a lump had taken form because of the two snaps.)

Skirt laid flat with the two snaps

Skirt laid flat with the snaps fastened together

View from the side

As you can see, it already looked thick from the side and the third snap wasn't even sewed yet. After thinking about it, I decided to remove the snaps and go for a longer route that guaranteed a better outcome—and that I should've taken originally. I unsewed one side of the zipper and the zipper seam from top to bottom, cut some fabric and pieced back everything together.

The extra fabric I cut off the skirt

I felt bad for not liking the skirt with the snaps because my mom had spent a great time placing and sewing them. And it's not like I wasn't aware of anything because she had shown me how thick it'd look like with two snaps, and I still agreed to proceed. The reason is that I didn't see any other solution except the one above—but that wasn't an option at the time because I was tired of deconstructing every garment and remaking it. Now I realize that in trying to go faster, I wound up with a not-so-good result and wasted time.

Following the alteration, the skirt band and especially upper rickrack

didn't align at the seam, but it's not noticeable when the skirt is worn...

Despite some imperfections, I'm happy with the skirt now. The waist fits perfectly and is absent of any bumps.

Skirt front

The pleats were pressed until the bottom because of personal preference.

Back

Close-up of the zipper at the back

My mom also sewed a hook on the skirt band.

It's hard to see, but the back of the skirt is pretty flat.

Skirt laid flat

And here's the top and the skirt together:

Sorry, I didn't press the bodice hence the folds!

Sadly, I don't think I'll wear this set often, notably because I don't like that the bodice keeps popping out of the skirt and gives an unattractive "puffy"/"saggy" effect from the side. I kind of apprehended it when I learned that the pattern was actually a two-piece, but I didn't feel like going off-track by attempting to make a dress.

If I ever use this pattern again, I'll try making a one-piece, because had this set be one, I would've loved it. I like the contrast stand-up collar, the skirt trim and the rickrack along with the fabric. It's only the bodice puffing that I dislike.

I feel like this post is slightly incomplete... still disappointed that it isn't as detailed as it should've been. Sometimes, I save my WIP post in another file just to make sure I have a backup in case a mishap happens (one time I accidentally deleted a blog post). Guess I'll always do this from now on.