Butterick 9927

Oy.  Hello again.  Well, 2012 was kind of a bust for sewing and blogging, huh?  Since last I posted, I think I completed three sewing projects, one of which was a dress for my niece’s first birthday (Ugh, she didn’t even say thank you!  What is point of sewing for people who aren’t old enough to verbally express gratitude and indebtedness??) and another of which was a hat for my mother (who, I will grudgingly admit, did say thank you.) Seriously, what a shitty, shitty 2012 track record. No time to sew is somewhat excusable, but no time for selfishness… well that’s just shameful.

The third project I managed to complete is the lovely vintage pattern Butterick 9927, a lovely early 60’s cocktail dress with a boat neck, short kimono sleeves, and a tulip skirt with deep box pleats. I sewed this up about a month ago but hadn’t gotten around posting about it until now. I had purchased this pattern more than a year ago off of Etsy and stashed it away with my vintage evening gown pattern hoard. I don’t have a picture of my copy of the pattern so here’s one from the Vintage Patterns wiki:

After such a long sewing drought this dress may seem a rather impractical choice, but as it turns out, it did fill a rather critical gap in my wardrobe:

And lest you be fooled by the Christmas tree, no, this is not a poorly chosen Christmas party dress, but rather the dress that I made for the ceremony in which I assumed legal ownership of my wonderful Dan. This is the only full-length shot I have of the dress, and that attention whore of a tree just happened to photo bomb the shot. Look at it, creeping up behind us, trying to steal my thunder! And before you accuse the Selfish Seamstress of being anti-Christmas, let me just say that the menorah and kinara also wanted to grab the spotlight from me.

I made the dress on something of a whim. Six days before I was scheduled to take legal possession of Dan, it occurred to me that I didn’t have a dress appropriate for the occasion. I had bought a pale blue vintage chiffon dress from the 1950s off of eBay a few weeks earlier, and was disappointed to find that the dress although beautiful, just didn’t work on me.  Every time I put it on and looked in the mirror, I felt like mutton dressed as embryo. Also the embryo was wearing someone else’s nightgown in a shade of blue that didn’t flatter the embryo’s skin tone and with a cut that created the illusion of oddly wide embryo hips. So just a few days shy of the wedding, I decided that I’d put my rusty sewing skills to the test. I dug madly through my pattern stash and unearthed Butterick 9927. I decided that with its short sleeves and modest boat neck, it would be very fitting for our super tiny, super informal winter morning (no spaghetti straps, thank you very much!) wedding at the New York City Marriage Bureau just a few days before Christmas. Interesting fact: although this is commonly referred to as getting married at “City Hall”, the Marriage Bureau is actually in a different building at the Office of the City Clerk:

My little nephew loved hugging the puffy skirt of the dress- he was hugging me around the knees all day. He’s too young to know that YOU DO NOT HUG THE SELFISH SEAMSTRESS EVER.

Another fun fact- inside the Office of the City Clerk there is a giant photograph of City Hall in front of which you can take photos of yourselves so it looks like you got married at City Hall:

Okay, but enough about the boring wedding stuff and onto the important sewing details! After deciding that having a dress to wear would be a good idea, I made a quick trip to the ridiculously overpriced only-game-in-town fabric store, picked up ivory silk shantung for the dress and some stiff cotton organdy for underlining, and sat down for 12 intense hours of sewing.

I had to do a couple of iterations of bodice muslins because my pattern is for a 32″ bust, and Selfish is perhaps 29″ on a good day. I’m pretty sure I took out more than 3″ of extra room too. It turned out that it wasn’t so easy to resize because with this kind of kimono sleeve, if you make significant changes to the bust, it has weird effects on the angle of the sleeve, and can create some strange resulting bubbles of fabric right in front of the shoulder.  I pondered this for a long time and ultimately managed to get a decent fit through trial and error, though it’s still not obvious to me what the “correct” way of doing this fit alteration would be.

The pattern calls for skirt “stiffening” and I’m not sure what stiffening is (was?) and how it differs from interfacing. I hadn’t run across the term before but from the pattern instructions, it seemed like it was intended to be used in the same fashion as interfacing. The cotton organdy was perfect and gave the skirt plenty of shape and volume. I did tuck a not-too-poofy vintage petticoat underneath anyway, as the tulip skirt with this pattern can gape in the front. The organdy also really helped to define and shape the box pleats, one of my favorite features of the dress:

The pattern calls for a facing at the neckline, but I opted to line the bodice instead using some remnants of nude Bemberg I had from another project. Considering the New York winter weather, I figured an extra layer of fabric would be a good idea. Also, although this was a quickie project for a low-key event, somehow leaving a bodice unlined with exposed seam allowances on the inside seemed to be setting the bar pretty low even for an informal wedding dress. Although the pattern didn’t call for it, I underlined the bodice with the organdy too to give it a little more body.  Here’s a good view of the boat neckline, another thing I love about this pattern:

In this picture, Dan is about to feed me cake. Although it may appear that we are engaging in a wedding-specific ritural, that’s not actually what’s going on here. This is actually a daily service that Dan is expected to provide for me.  I don’t think I’ve lifted my own cake fork for the last 5 years. Usually I just yell, “DAN, CAKE!” while lying on the couch and he whips one up and feeds it to me. It’s awesome. The last two pictures are from the tiny reception we had with our families and I think the dress worked well for this also, even though it was in the evening. I could have gone with something a little more splashy and bare I suppose, but two dresses for such a casual, small affair seemed like overkill.

In the end, I loved my simple, hastily executed dress (and our simple, hastily executed wedding!) The pattern and cut were perfect for the occasion, I loved the crumply, rustling shantung bolstered with stiff organdy, and most of all, it was comfortable!

We’ll see if 2013 brings more time for sewing. I already picked up leaf green silk georgette and matching leaf green silk chiffon while in New York to make yet another wedding dress, this time for my sister who is getting married in the summer! And before you readers tsk tsk at me for taking on yet another S.W.A.G. project, let me point out that it’s a fair trade, considering what my sister just made for me:

Three gorgeous tiers of chocolate buttermilk cake with mocha buttercream, decorated with handmade sugar snowflakes, no two alike. It was honestly the best cake that I have ever tasted. It was so beautiful that I couldn’t stand to look while cutting it!

Happy 2013, everyone- I hope you get plenty of selfish sewing time for yourselves!  (Actually, I hope I get plenty of selfish sewing time for myself- who cares what you get! Hahahah!)