#basic dress

[anielskaaniela]

How to Sew a Basic Dress for Begginers + Free Pattern

In this post, you’ll learn how to sew a basic dress step by step, choose the best fabrics, customize the pattern, and make an easy beginner-friendly dress you’ll actually love wearing. Some dresses are dramatic. They swirl.Sparkle.They require twelve pattern pieces, emotional stability, and maybe a tiny architecture degree. This is not that dress. This is the kind of basic dress you sew on a…

How to Sew a Basic Dress for Begginers + Free Pattern

[professorpski]

She was so orderly, so well balanced, one stitch of her hand-sewed organdy collar was so clearly identical with every other, her very seams, if you can understand it, ran so exactly where they should, that she set me to pulling myself straight.

This is the description of Miss Emily, a spinster, sole survivor of her family, who has insisted on renting her home out for the summer for far less than it is worth to the narrator. Miss Emily’s crisp, fine cotton collar on her dark dress was a common look for a basic dress in the early 20th century, and often came with matching cuffs. The hand stitching tells you she either has skill or once had money.

As the story progresses, mysterious things happen in the rented house at night. Does this house hold a secret about Miss Emily? This is from Mary Roberts Rinehart story titled The Confession. It was first published in 1917 as a serial in a magazine, and then republished with another story in 1921 in novel form. 

Rinehart uses fashion to signal who people are so far as age, taste, and class. Although in this case Miss Emily seems to be not quite as orderly as she appears.  

[skirtmag]

[platanarium]

[cronicasdeunafashionista]

[professorpski]

Safe Way to Wash Lace Collars

This is from an amazing tome by Popular Mechanics that came out in 1949 called Complete Book of Home Repair and Improvements which purported to answer all the questions they regularly got asked about. I found it in a library used bookstore and have been entranced by its ambitions. I envision a couple, one of them an ex-GI, now keen on making themselves a home and full of youthful energy because the book include plans for building an entire set of kitchen cabinets (!!!) and digging and pouring your own concrete swimming pool(!!!). My dad was an electrical engineer and a home tinkerer and the book embodies his spirit of home improvement which included such projects as a paneling an entire bathroom with teakwood. One of his more exotic ideas. 

Less ambitious projects abound like this one. You put your lace collars or crocheted doilies in a quart glass jar with water and washing detergent shut the lid and shake it a bit. This prevents stretching that might happen in a regular wash or rubbing on a washboard. Then empty the jar of soapy water, refill it with clean, repeat until the water is clear.

Collars of all kinds were basted to what was called a basic dress and then switched out from day to day for variety, making one dress seem like several dresses. This was thrifty and can be creative too. It also made a small bit of hand needlework go a long way. Collar switching, with matching cuffs, started in the late 19th century and continued well into the 20th.

[skirtmag]

[professorpski]

She had done nothing more electrify everyone by discarding magnificently, and without permission, the disfiguring ticking apron. That was all. But the effect was astonishing. She wore a plain, slim, short black dress, made of three yards of ninety-nine cent material, and thirty-three cent set of embroidered collar and cuffs. ... That was all, but it was enough. Everybody looked at her, everybody praised her, and the packing-room boys went down like a row of ten-pins.

The basic dress, always done in a sober color was a mainstay of the working woman in the first half of the 20th Century. Women made it interesting with a collar and cuff sets that could be changed out. The heroine of Kathleen Norris’ My Best Girl from 1927, Maggie, opted for a basic dress as part of her effort to live an “ideel life” or create some order in the chaos of her home life and work life. It makes sense that she would pick what a sales clerk would wear as she works in a department store. Notice that the dress is short which was the daytime as well as the night time in the mid twenties. And she must have made it herself as Norris describes her mother as lazy and her sister as spoiled.

Maggie is not a clerk in the novel, but a kind of runner, running down to get stock and delivering anything and everything the clerks need. Norris so often describes her as grimy that I thought was because of her work. So I am left wondering if her change of clothing, which makes sense as a reflection of her personal and professional ambitions, makes sense as a practical choice? Maybe not, but the Dress Doctors would have applauded Maggie’s thrifty creativity and her simple dress as expressions and reflections of her youthful vigor. Mary Pickford played her in the film version.