DuBarry 5637 (1943) dress variant: Part I

Listening: Turnpike Troubadours, Diamonds and Gasoline.

Yeah, I know--two projects at once?  What am I thinking?  

What happened was this: I started the blouse this weekend and brought it to work with me yesterday to do some hand-finishing during lunch.  However, the city showed up at 11:00 to fix the water main break that's been bubbling through our driveway for the past two weeks.  They said they would have to turn the water off for about four hours.  If that four hours was on the same time scale as the "three days" it was supposed to take to address the leak over a week ago, that meant more like six to twelve hours.  Without toilets.  Human resources sent us home.

I forgot to take the blouse with me.  I offered to drive a coworker home and was so worried about shoveling the junk out of the passenger seat of my car that I forgot the blouse, so I got home and had a whole afternoon ahead of me and nothing to do with it (okay, not really, but nothing I wanted to do with it).  Since 5637 was fresh in my mind, I started the dress variant.  This is a semi-muslin.  I hope it works, but if it doesn't I won't cry.

The fabric is cheap mustard-yellow (yes, I know that this is a terrible color.  Bear with me here) retro-dots print from Wal-Mart.  Two dollars a yard on clearance:

(This is photoshopped from the red retro dots I also have.)

I got some awesome buttons on Etsy but then decided they were too good for the dress, so I went back and ordered some slightly different, still nice but less spectacularly so, buttons:

I also used Nicole Needles' awesome tutorial to draft a Peter Pan collar.  I'm not a fan of Peter Pan collars in general but this dress is going to be so obnoxious that I might as well.

If this fails, I blame my lack of measuring and drafting skills, not the tutorial.  She does a great job of showing you not only what to do, but why you should do it.  Overlapping the shoulder seams so the collar will develop a slight roll is something that is not immediately obvious; I was all set to draw the collar without that.

I replaced the gathers with short tucks.  We're--gasp--going modern here.  This is going to be one of those dress that I hate in principle: The kind of dress that people call "retro" because it's eccentric looking, even though it isn't actually retro to any known time period and, thus, in my book, can't really be called retro.  "Indie" might be more appropriate, even though I hate that term, too.

These are the tucks in the front:

Two pairs in front, two pairs in back: