Thursday, April 17, 2014

A Vintage Easter Dress

This is my vintage inspired Easter dress. I've never sewn myself anything this involved before so I am thrilled that it turned out this well. It's almost exactly like I envisioned. I started with a modern pattern, McCall's 6599 from the Fashion Star line, but I made changes, of course. I shortened the sleeves even more and changed the smallish (quarter maybe) circle skirt to a full gathered and color blocked skirt. I added the belt with 4 yellow buttons on my own too. It seemed too plain without it.


The princess seams provide a great opportunity for color-blocking on the bodice. When I found this double-sided fabric at Joann's back in February, I had this vision right away, even before knowing about the vintage challenge at Challenge Create - Adult Edition at Skirtfixation. After searching the internet for more inspiration, I felt like a full gathered skirt would be more fitting with the 50's to 60's era. It also made it a lot less stressful to make the color-blocking changes to the skirt without having to be so exact.




I think I have a thing for gray lately. My skirt last week was gray, this dress is gray, (I'm sitting on our new gray sofa), and last night I sewed myself another gray skirt and top!! What is up with that? Something to do with the never-ending winter around here maybe?

So to combat the gray-ness, we went down to our local beach to try to take pictures but the wind was too strong and the light was too harsh. I had bribed my 14 year old son (home on spring break) to take pictures of his mom out in public wearing her June Cleaver dress. Heehee. It cost me $8.46 at Wendy's to get no usable pictures. Arrrrg.

Back home with my lousy 12 year old point and shoot camera and it's timer, I was able to get some pictures of the details.

My nearly invisible zipper



Cap sleeves.



Machine stitched blind hem and buttoned belt



I can't remember being this excited about an Easter Dress since I was a little kid. I have been trying like to crazy to finish up this post so I can focus more on Holy Week. See you next week and have a blessed Easter!! Alleluia!!

P.S. Voting is now open if you want to follow this link and scroll all the way down to vote for me!??

10 comments:

  1. so cute! I love it!

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  2. Very nice keep up the great work good luck

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  3. Pooh, what inspiring fabric! I love you look this week too, thanks for sewing along!

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  4. Fabulous job! I love how you used the double-sided fabric! Thanks for linking up to Inspire Us Thursday on The Inspired Wren.

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  5. You made a beautiful dress! I really like it!!! :)

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  6. Your dress is beautiful! I love the princess seams.

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  7. Love the princess seams! Great job on the zipper/

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  8. This dress is so lovely, good job!

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  9. That is really cute! I love the two greys... I would never have guessed that it was two sides of the same fabric.

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  10. I love this dress and the colour combination of the prints! it looks absolutely gorgeous on you!

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