Tuesday 29 September 2015

Little Houses Retro Frock



This is one of the patterns I got from a bulk lot of patterns from a friend's mum's collection.  I don't know the story behind the "Woman" patterns.  I'm not sure if they were associated with any particular pattern house. I liked the look of this basic 50's style frock which I thought would be perfect with my little houses fabric. This was a super easy dress to make.  I did learn a new thing, the shoulder pleat. Which you insert at the front. Not sure what the idea is behind this. I think it's another one of those things that works for women of a larger bust size. As for me it leaves quite a lot of room in that department.

 


Just loved this material when I saw it in the soft furnishing section of Spotlight.  It's a nice stiff cotton and will hopefully wear well.  I bought this along with my olive fabric I used for my Alice dress.  I thought this would be an easy pattern matching exercise given that the house pattern seems to run in lines.  I was pretty careful to match things but somehow the skirt in particular didn't match up with the side seams and the pattern.  No biggy I guess but I did try.  I also had been watching some tutorials for lap zips as I thought I'd give one a go.  I did think the size was running to a large but once I did darts and ran up one side seam it was pretty much just enough room for a regular zip.  Perhaps next time I'll venture out of my zip comfort zone. 


The pattern didn't have any facing pieces. The instructions said to create your own. I made some bias for the neckline, but when It came to the sleeves I decided to draft facing pieces from the bodice pattern.  The sleeve line had a bit of shaping to it and when I tried to add some bias it looked a bit poo. I also did a hand stitched hem.  I'm quite happy doing my hand sewing while I'm sitting around watching some telly.



I think all in all this dress was probably only $12 all up.  The material was only $5 a metre and the pattern probably worked out to $2.  So overall pretty awesome on the price front. 


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