Also known as "getting way the heck ahead of myself". This is notes more than an actual beginning.
I have a bit of a split personality when it comes to clothing. A big part of me wants to live my life in smart little 1940's dresses and trim, girly, shoes, and even aspires to being able to do something with my hair.
The other part of me looks like this:
A college friend described this as the "lumberjack in a dress" look. I'll save you the trouble of asking: Yes, I graduated from high school in the mid-1990's, at the height of the grunge era. No, I was never into grunge music, but the look was a good cover for a girl who couldn't keep up with the aesthetic expectations of a WASP-y, upper-middle-class, high school. The shirt I'm wearing in that drawing was a Pendleton that I stole from my father; it was older than I was. I wore it until the holes in the elbows were so big it was functionally short-sleeved, and then accidentally left it at Anderson Fair one warm night after a Paul Geremia show. I was so traumatized I had to get on eBay and find a replacement.
Anyway, I have an intractable attraction to dark, shapeless, gloomy, clothing.
Simplicity 9200 (1994): Loose-fitting dress with drop waist and round collar, bishop sleeves set into elongated armscyes, and gathered skirt.
This is exactly what it appears to be: A shapeless dress with baggy sleeves and a waist seam at butt level. It's a 1990's take on a 1920's style.
It's even more obvious in the line drawing:
The pieces look like this:
The fabric:
I measured the pattern today and it's big. Really big. The total bust measurement for a size 12 (34-inch bust), with seam allowances removed, is 42 inches. It's 23 inches from neck to waist seam, which puts the waist seam right at the point across my backside where I most need a "wide load" sign. Yeah, not going to happen. Even authentic 1920's patterns didn't let you put a waist seam there, and we've all seen how unflattering they could be.
The goal here is to make it a little more old-fashioned and a little less unflattering. I'd really like it to lean a little more toward an early-1920's dress. So the plan right now is:
1) Raise the waist two to three inches, so it's low but not around my hips.
2) Raise the bottoms of the armscyes.
3) Reshape the sleeve accordingly.
4) If needed, add a small bust dart. I shouldn't need this with that much ease but sometimes things don't behave in real life they way they do on paper.
5) Possibly flare sides seams from a size 12 to a size 14 from armscye to waist, and curve slightly inward to trim the shape a little bit.
A test muslin will help me figure all this out.
I may add vertical pintucks or flat tucks to the front, and horizontal ones to the skirt. I like tucks in skirts.
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