In the Garden: V9021

New floral dress - quickly, out to the garden with you!

There are probably two things that will strike you about this dress:

1. the fabric, and  

2. the shoulders.

First off, the fabric. 

This stuff is a stretch cotton, referred to on the internet by a few people who've used it as THE fabric of the year. For 2013, that is!  I bought it on impulse and without a plan in late 2013 from Tessuti fabrics, and then I loved it so much I couldn't decide what to make with it - I'd only really bought enough (1.6 metres) for one garment, you see. Meanwhile, Rachel made a Belladone dress, Kirsty made a Tokyo jacket and an O'Keefe skirt, Debbie made a Rigel bomber, and the fabric soon sold out. And finally I made my mind up in early 2015...

And then the shoulders. 

I spend a lot of time taking patterns out of my filing cabinet, staring at them, and choosing "the next ones to make", which then face me from behind my sewing machine, ready to go. There's an 80s pattern that was sitting behind my machine for ages, and it's got a similar wide-shouldered, straight-skirted look to this one. A couple of weeks ago I decided to start on it, and I flipped over the pattern envelope to see how much fabric and what notions it needed. To my horror I discovered it used those ginormous, thick shoulder pads that were around in the 80s - the sort you sometimes come across in second hand stores, no longer available in fabric shops.  I have tried using big shoulder pads before, but when you start off with narrow shoulders, it's hard to place enormous shoulder pads without them hitting your neckline - so the 80s pattern was retired to the filing cabinet. 

Enter Vogue 9021: the same basic silhouette - big shoulders, narrow skirt - but with no shoulder pads. It's described as "Fitted dress has front and back extending into sleeves, low armholes, back zipper and hemline split."  This is what it's intended to look like, and here's the tech drawing too:

The pattern isn't recommended for stretch fabrics but obviously I've made it in a stretch woven and I think it's perfectly fine - my fabric and fit choices did impact the sizing though, as I ended up taking the side seams in by one to two sizes (down to about a 10 or 12 from the 14 I cut out). This does make for a very fitted dress, which you probably wouldn't want if the fabric weren't a stretch, but in such a non-drapey fabric the dress just looked too big in my usual size.

I have to say I think the dress would look very different in, say, a thin, drapey silk - I doubt there'd be as much shoulder enhancement, and you'd want the dress to fall in folds and drapes rather than cling! You can see the dress made from this pattern by Adrienne in a poly blend over here - and she also shows you a very similar dress sold by Saint Laurent :).


I really like the way this dress has turned out, but if you're thinking of making the pattern, I have a couple of cautions...

The back split is kind of high, and it's finished in the "Easy" way. I folded mine differently so there's some overlap between the two sides, and stitched down the top of the fold as you would the split in a denim skirt, say. This just strengthens the split a bit, and reduces the likelihood of the split travelling up any higher under stress. 

And the side view can give you a lot of side bra... You could obviously wear a tank top or a slip underneath - or just a regular bra that you're prepared to share with friends and passersby.  My daughter says, "what's so rude about seeing underwear?" but I'm still undecided on that one... 

Along with that side bra issue, also comes the fact that the inside of your fabric and sleeve facing are going to be visible. I just serged the edge of my sleeve facings before top stitching, but if I'd thought this through better I would have turned them under and pressed them before top stitching. And my fabric is a plain white on the wrong side - the floral is just a print, not woven into the fabric. I think if I make this again I'll fully line the bodice with something that complements the outer fabric, and I'll skip the sleeve facings entirely. 

I should mention the fit of this dress too!

When I sew dresses, I tend to sew shoulder seams, then attach skirt pieces to front and back, and then baste the side seams and centre back to check the fit. This dress shape looks very simple, but the bodice fit didn't work for me straight out of the envelope. Initially I had a lot of excess fabric above and to the sides of my bust; this might have been alright in a drapey fabric but just looked like poor fit in this stretch cotton. I'm sure this is an unorthodox approach, but to remove the excess fabric I decided I needed to create more tension between waist and shoulder. Originally the shoulder line was quite curved; I altered this to a straight line from neckline (where the length to my waist seemed OK) to the start of the sleeve facings.

This unusual alteration seemed to take me down a couple of sizes over the bust as it reduced the distance from shoulder to waist (ie if you have a small bust, you need a smaller length of fabric to go from shoulder to waist) - you wouldn't need to do this if you had either strong shoulders or a larger bust.  I also had to take the bodice in a couple of sizes at the (very short) side bodice seams.  Based on this experience, I'd recommend not cutting out the sleeve facings (if you want to use facings rather than lining) until you've got the fit worked out. Hmm - isn't that what muslins are for?

And I should mention the metrage and dress length, right?

Vogue says you'll need 1.8 m of 150 cm wide fabric or 2.7 m of 115 cm wide fabric for a size 14 (the size I originally cut) in the longer version, view B, of this dress - assuming direction or nap aren't considerations.  I only had 1.6 metres of 130 cm wide fabric, and I really wanted the longer, midi length dress rather than the knee length (view A) version, but I found I had enough fabric to add about 5 cm to the dress length IF I cut my sleeve facings from a coordinating stretch cotton - I think this would have ended up only just below knee length otherwise at the standard longer length, and FYI I'm around 5'8".  To try to maximise the length and minimise hem bulk I then also used a stretch lace to bind the hem, hand stitched in place:

The pattern recommends using a regular zip with a hook and eye, but I just used an invisible zip - I love invisible zips, and I don't tend to get any strain at the top of dress zips. I got the seams nicely aligned, but as you can see I didn't even attempt any print matching - there was no fabric to spare for print matching!

 

My conclusion is that this is a simple but lovely silhouette, and one that to me is reminiscent of both 30s and some 60s dress shapes. It's definitely not an everyday dress - I won't be hanging out in it on weekends, but maybe it'll work for a party or frocktails,  I really like pretending to have bigger shoulders, and the wiggle factor is fun :)

Thanks for reading, and see you soon!

- Gabrielle xx