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© Cathy HayThank you very much for all your wonderful compliments on
my new gown! I'm delighted with it, more delighted than I think I've been with anything I've ever made, and clearly you think it's pretty awesome too. It's one of those rare projects in which everything just came together as if it was meant to be, and I'd love to walk you through it, if you'd like to take the tour. If you want details, you got 'em - and I'm going to assume you want lots, so here goes.
As you can see in the photo above, this is a gown that the V&A show off with one photo only - and it's a photo of a detail. I have no record of what it looks like other than this detail photo and the line drawings on the left hand page, so making it come to life was a process of putting together the puzzle pieces.
As well as there being so few images, of course there's no pattern - but we do have a very similar pattern. Two, in fact, because a similar gown of near-identical date was patterned both by Janet Arnold in
Patterns of Fashion 1 and by Norah Waugh in
The Cut of Women's Clothes (I recommend hunting for a second hand copy of that second title). Looking at the details, I'm sure that both Ms Arnold and Ms Waugh got their mitts on the same dress, which is, incidentally, also in the V&A in London.
Now, I know I'm not supposed to reproduce images from books blatantly, but it would help to show you the general idea of that similar gown and its pattern, so I'm going to be very cheeky and link to images uploaded by people who are less nervous about copyright than I.
Here's Janet Arnold's drawing of the similar gown...courtesy of Jenni at Living With Jane, whom I think I probably know on Facebook, if only she'd give her surname.Here's Janet Arnold's pattern...courtesy of Lauren at American Duchess, whose shoes are awesome and totally worth the import taxes. Also, A* for customer service, Lauren. You rock.What I want you to see in the pattern is that this is pretty much a rectangle of fabric - apart from the joins between widths of the textile, it's pretty much a case of taking an enormous rectangle and pleating the heck out of it to create a bodice shape at the top. The small pieces down the side of the page are just the bodice lining pieces and the sleeve - the main part of it is just a heavily manipulated rectangle of fabric.
But how big a rectangle? How much fabric is there in this thing?
This is where we turn to
the details of the gown on the V&A website - hit "More information" and you get a surprising amount of facts and figures. (Here comes the Math part.)
"Length: 70 in back, neck to hem, Length: 72 in front, shoulder to hem". Awesome. No matter how small the person who wore this, draping a tape measure 70" from the nape of my neck indicated that this length pretty much matched the line drawing in the book (ie, floor length with a satisfyingly delicious train). So I know how long the rectangle needs to be (plus a few inches to allow for screw-ups, naturally.)
"...constructed from two and a half pieces of fabric, 42 inches wide selvedge to selvedge..." Now THIS is what I really needed to know. Two and half pieces, 42" wide equals a total of 105" wide, or 267cm, since I'm in Europe. :P
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© Cathy HaySo now that I had some dimensions, I could rip up an old flannelette sheet and get draping. I was pretty excited at this point, since I had such exact dimensions to go on, although as you can see in the photo above, Freddie, Dexter and Joss were singularly unimpressed.
Since I'm reasonably symmetrical, I draped one half only, beginning at the centre back with a piece of fabric approx 150cm (60") wide and 2m (80") long. So I pinned it down the centre back, along the grain of the fabric, and first of all gave it two fairly even pleats towards the center back. No shaping required in these, it was literally a case of pleating a bit of fabric away to make a nice pleat at the centre back of the skirt.
But how big should I make the pleats?
I measured around the mannequin at the largest point (bust level), from the centre back to the position where the front edge of the gown needed to end.
(total width of my fabric) - (this measurement) = (total amount of fabric I need to pleat away out of sight)
Amount of fabric to put into each pleat (roughly) = (total amount of fabric I need to pleat away out of sight) divided by (the total number of pleats I'm making)
The total number of pleats all the way around was the number of pleats I could see in the photo of the back of the dress, completed by adding the number I could see in the front of Janet Arnold's pattern.
With each pleat I was therefore roughly putting away 7.5cm (3") of fabric. This isn't exact - obviously the shaping would be achieved by making pleats bigger or smaller on the way around the body - but this gave me a ballpark I could work with.
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© Cathy HayAfter doing the centre back pleats, I pinned the shape of the curve I wanted for the second row of pleats (above). Again, I pleated away roughly 3" of fabric each time, making the fabric continue smoothly around the mannequin.
I took care to ensure that when I finished a group of three pleats, the threads of the cross grain of the fabric were always horizontal at the bottom as the fabric travelled around to the next group of pleats.
This ensured that the skirt would hang right - but I also checked this by draping a piece of fabric that was the entire length of the dress, not just the bodice. When the pleating was done, I'd be able to arrange the skirt around the foot of the mannequin and ensure that everything looked good.
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© Cathy HayI also ensured that I was making the pleats go further down towards the waist than I really needed them to go; unpicking them a bit would be easier than trying to make the pleats longer later.
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© Cathy HayAs for the armhole, I just left as much fabric there as possible, since I knew that the sleeves would be tighter, with a smaller armhole, than modern sleeves. I could cut this back later.
I followed the look of the V&A picture as much as I could, eyeballing it, although at this stage I didn't yet bother trying to offset each pleat to show a sliver of the pleats beneath.
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© Cathy HayAt the front, I copied the general look and number of pleats in
the front of Janet Arnold's pattern, smoothing it up over the shoulder and letting the fabric tell me what it wanted to do, if that makes sense. As you can see, I ran out of fabric and had to pin another piece on to have enough to go over the shoulder.
Link from Lauren, The Lady of Portland House, who gives a dress diary for her own open robe.This then met the back piece (see the image of the back again, above) - I pinned a line along the back piece from neck to armhole, showing where I wanted the shoulder seam to be, and drew the front over the shoulder to meet it.
Here's the overall result, which gave me one heck of a happy on a Sunday lunchtime.
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© Cathy Hay | | ![]()
© Cathy Hay |
And then I marked the edges of all the pleats with a black fineline pen, and unpinned it flat onto the table. As you can see, I had to take care to mark and number the groups of pleats in order to be able to make sense of this thing.
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© Cathy Hay
