Burda Style For people who sew

Description

I had myself all planned to make a dress for the 4th of July but got sidetracked by making a dress to wear to the County Fair. This dress was from Dubarry 2472B from 1940.

I was very excited to find it in both the orange and the blue that resembled the ’39 World’s Fair colors. The dress is of the blue and the pockets are lined in the orange, and I used purchased orange bias tape for trim on the pockets. The buttons on the back are vintage orange with triangles inside circles- kind of reminiscent of the Trylon and Perisphere. Although I’m not an adamant collector of fair merchandise I do really enjoy the color scheme and whimsy of design, especially of accessories and the like, of the ’39 fair, so it was great fun to incorporate that inspiration into a dress! I still want to make up a bolero to match, too!

It did have it’s fair share of frustrations. I’ve never had a lot of success with DuBarry patterns, but I haven’t sewn very many of them either. It did, in the end, look like the illustration, but the sizing was very off and there was not as much fullness to the skirt as in the illustration. The bust was supposed to be 34, but it ended up being something closer to 40″, which was obviously quite too big for a sleeveless dress. While I do take into account that a lot of that could be my fabric, it did take quite a bit of fitting, as is common for me with sleeveless summer dresses. I made up the shorter version then chickened out on the length and finished the edge with bias binding. I’m not a big fan of showing my knees. I did make the straps too long so fixed it by just doing double buttons at back. No biggie! I still really love the dress, and I probably will make another one in the future!

Material Notes

The fabric I used was a very nice looser weave rayon/linen blend.

Difficulty

Intermediate

Categories

Season

Summer

For

Women

Garment Type

Dress

Style

Vintage

Credits

Dubarry 2472B

http://wearinghistoryblog.com/2011/07/05/finished-project-a-fair-dress-for-the-fair/