Red Vixen Dress

Here she is folks, my Red Vixen Dress. I finally finished her up this week and I'm pretty excited about how she turned out. As you remember, this is my first attempt at a vintage pattern. McCall's 5995 from 1961. I was trying to capture the mood of this time period and was looking for inspiration all over.

Now, let's get back to the pattern, shall we? The pattern itself was too big for me and I had to grade down a size, though I think I could still do with one more size down in the bodice. This grading thing really frightened me as I've already said. It turned out rather well though, I think. All in all, I'm very pleased with the dress.

Being as this is my first vintage pattern, let's have a chat about vintage pattern instructions. This pattern is from 1961 and I haven't yet tried anything older but they just did things so differently. The pattern instructions rely heavily on a lot of hand stitching. I was rather impressed with that. The instructions show you how to handstitch a buttonhole, and finish seam allowances by hand. I didn't vary much from the instructions except to put in triangular bound buttonholes rather than the traditional sort, but the pattern does call for and give you step by step's for great bound buttonholes.

After grading down the pattern I noticed that the skirt was still huge. I decided to tweak it after I sewed it and this did prove beneficial. At first, I got it too snug. I could get the dress on and walk around in it, but sitting was impossible. Ha. It's still a little snug when I sit, but how could I possibly go bigger, it's a wiggle dress for heaven's sakes! My biggest question here is how do you make a garment so fitted and still sit? I would love to hear your thoughts on this. I think you would have to have a bit of stretch in the fabric to achieve this whereas mine fabric has none.

Onto the zipper! My favorite part is the zipper here. I'm so proud of it. This zipper is handpicked and lapped. It worked out so wonderfully. I love it!!!! I was just finishing up the zipper when I read this post from Gertie's Blog. I completely agree with her and some of the comments left about the hardships of invisible zippers. I had thought I would do an invisible zipper for this dress and then I remembered a fiasco I had with a different dress. I passed up the invisible zipper for a basic zipper instead. It looks 1000x better in my opinion. Ecstatic about this part of the dress, simply ecstatic.

I couldn't be happier with this dress. It's made using cherry red merino wool twill which I got from here and I lined the skirt with red dupioni silk. Below is a shot of the inside detail. I finished the seam allowances with some handmade charmeuse silk bias tape in baby pink, kind of a Valentiney touch, but hey, it's Valentine's this weekend. And what could possibly be better than to be smitten while wearing this number?