1950

Sewing Diaries

1950's Rehearsal Dinner Dress

December 23rd, 2005: I started dreaming up this black silk 50's style dress to wear to my sister's rehersal dinner in August or so. The dress would be long sleeved, slightly boat necked, with a huge, full, gathered skirt. While I did make this dress, I did not end up wearing it to the rehearsal dinner. More on that to come.

I basically made this pattern up. The skirt is several large rectangles of dupioni, with two triangle shaped gores on either side. The bodice is princess seamed and the neckline and waistline are both finished with matching black silk piping. The sleeves taped to the wrist and are bound with a bias cut strip of self fabric. The entire bodice is boned with 6 featherweight plastic bones. I originally tried using metal bones from Lacis but found it made the dress too heavy. The plastic boning works great and was so easy to adjust and trim to size.

I originally planned to gather the skirt, but found this physically impossible with the stiff dupioni. Instead, it is softly pleated.

Now, for why I never wore this dress to the rehearsal dinner: I made this dress while far away from a fabric store, and only had a 12-14 inch invisible zipper on hand. I put it in temporarily and shimmy-shaked my way out of the dress when I wore it to Midnight Mass at Duquesne on the 19th. This was putting too much dress on the seams, so I ripped it out and replaced it with a 22-24 inch zipper.

This zipper was defective. It was missing a few teeth and had one large tooth where about three should have been. I got into it to go to church on Christmas Eve, but did not have time to get a zipper and fix it before we left for Philadelphia the 26th. :( I am disappointed I could not wear this dress for it's intended purpose, but glad I got to wear it for Christmas. As soon as I feel like dealing with formalwear again, I'll replace the zipper and send it back to Coast & Clark.

As for the sweater, I found it very inexpensively at K-Mart. I hemmed it and took in the sides to it worked perfectly with the dress.

So all is well that ends well.