Sew for Victory update

Hi Everyone!  I'm very excited to be back in sewing mode...

Here's a little confession:  Whenever I stop sewing or crafting for awhile,  I begin to lose confidence in myself and wonder if I ever had much skill to begin with.   Sometimes I need to just play with the fabric and patterns for awhile and tell myself that what I create doesn't need to be Coco Chanel or Vera Wang good,   I just have to like it.

So when last I wrote about the "Sew for Victory" project,  I had found 2 lovely patterns circa 1947 in my collection.

I planned to do the long sleeve blouse from the first and the skirt from the latter.      I have some lovely dark red cotton fabric with little roses on it  to use for the blouse, but haven't found or decided on any fabric for the skirt yet.

close up of the fabric

Prepping the Pattern:

I mentioned that this is my first foray into the world of using a vintage pattern to sew with.  I have collected them for years, and love to look at them and use the pictures for inspiration, but never actually got around to using one.

First off,   I was taken by surprise - where were the lines? the seam allowance, grain lines, dart lines,   all that handy-dandy info that they print on modern patterns was nowhere to be found... or was it?    At first glance, the pieces looked like plain tissue paper with little holes punched in them.  Upon further examination I found the little holes were actually strategically places and all the aforementioned information was right there in black and whi....er little punches.

   Note on the this piece is punched in little letters "blouse front"    There are also square holes that demark the fold line for the fabric/facing area (where the row of buttons will eventually go.)

Kind of hard to see, but there are also small holes around the edge to show where the seam allowance is, and also two sets of 3 holes - sewing lines for the darts.

Here is a larger look at the whole of the pattern pieces.
These appear to be unused with the original factory folds... so I gather that unlike modern patterns, most of which are large rectangles of tissue that you have to cut the pattern pieces out of,  these vintage pattern pieces come precut to the size mentioned on the envelope.


Now given that these lovely patterns are now near septuagenarians,  I worry about handling them and sticking pins in and cutting them etc.  
Here's a little trick I learned from my Mom :  Wax Paper!

Some brands of modern pattern will sell a size range - example "A" would be sizes 4-8, "B" would be 8-12. and "C" would be 12-16 etc.   The pattern pieces then have multiple lines around them with each line being a different size in the range (ends up looking a little like tree ring dating- concentric circles)
If you cut the size you need, you are then not able to use the pattern again for a larger size (which would be helpful if your kids like mine grew a size every other week!)     This is where wax paper comes in handy  - you trace the size you need on the wax paper, and thus preserve the original pattern piece for future use.
Wax paper is also more durable than the tissue paper, which tends to rip very easily,  and comes in a nice long roll for about $2, where some patterns cost upwards of $10-$20.     I've also found it helpful in close encounters of the feline kind  (my kitty likes to help me sew, but sometimes her claws get in the way :(

 

So....  I traced the pattern pieces onto the wax paper, cut it out, and then used a sharpie marker to note the markings on the piece.

 Here are the instruction sheets that came with the pattern.  These unfortunately are not in as great of shape as the pattern pieces themselves.   I will have to try to photocopy them at some point so as to minimize their use.












Here comes Lightning, my steadfast kitty helper....she of course has noticed that I have spread out pattern pieces and lovely fabric and must come to take a look. (Thankfully by this point the original pattern has been copied and put away)

examining the fabric

 giving her approval

    the fabric has passed the inspection

Here I have laid out the wax paper pattern pieces before cutting them out.

 and proceeding to cut them out

That's all I have for today kiddies,  next stop sewing machine!

Do you have any pet helpers for your projects? I'd love to hear about them!

Thanks for reading.

Sew for Victory

Hello Everyone,   once again it is a cold and damp day here.   We have had 3 storms this month so far, and another 3 due over the next week. The one that set down last night has been named "Q".   (Where the temperature here is slightly above freezing, we most likely will have rain/freezing rain instead of snow, -everything is already muddy and slushy, so what's a little more?)
I have decided that the person to come up with this storm name must either be scraping at the bottom of the barrel, or   a big Star Trek fan.( i'm hoping it's the second one)

'Q' from Star Trek

Now Q was never my favorite character,  it kind of bugged me that the Q Continuum, albeit an intelligent race, could consistently screw with the humans' minds and timelines to such an extent they they thought they were having  breakdowns.  Although it  turned out that Q himself was a bit of a renegade and the rest of his race didn't approve of his theatrics,     It didn't really seem like they were interested in conquering humans, more like they were playing 'cat and mouse' games for their own amusement.  but I digress...

(a quick side note here before totally leaving the Star Trek subject - there was a way cool episode last year for American Pickers where one of their clients was none other than William Shatner, who, along with his wife, had bought a farm house in Kentucky. They wanted Mike & Frank (the pickers) to get them some specific antique items (totally cool pie safe anyone?)  with which to redecorate a home office. Love this show,  (and having the classic Star Trek connection was just like sprinkles on ice cream for me.)

So back to the main theme of this post.    Over the past week, I have come to learn that two awesome vintage blogs I read are holding sew-alongs. (one I will discuss here, and the other which is for the 60's in a separate post)

If you don't know what a sew-along is, you can think of it something like a book club, but instead of reading a book, people are sewing a garment - usually within a theme and time frame put forth by the Blogger hosting it, and its over the internet not in real time.  (yes I know the similarities to 'book club' are melting down).
 So Rochelle from Lucky Lucille started a "Sew for Victory" sew along.  This is a 40's inspired one, where you pick a garment or item from that time period to sew.  
It goes until the end of March, and she has a flickr group set up for people to join who are interested in participating.

For this project, one should take into account the thrifty mindset of a 40's gal (or guy) when preparing for this project. There was rationing going on, people were recycling for the war effort,  trying not purchasing new items, but finding new ways to re-use their old ones. "Make do and make mend."  So maybe instead of buying new fabric for your project, use some up from your stash?  Re-purpose some notions and trim  from some worn out clothes you have?

Rochelle also has several posts with ideas for 40's garments, patterns and other great 40's inspired things to get you in the right frame of mind.     I spent the past couple of days going through my pattern collection to see if I had any 40's patterns or a more modern pattern that could be modified to make a 40's look. I have a ton of patterns from 1950's-present, but luckily I found that I actually had 2 patterns, from 1947.  (which in my case would make this less of a "Sew for Victory" and more of a "Sew because We-Won-and-You-Didn't!"  (insert picture of kid sticking her tongue out here)

My two vintage 40's patterns are these:

Vogue 6511

Vogue 6231

Vogue 6511 is described as a "Two piece lounging Pyjama set" and
Vogue 6231 is a Skirt (sorry, no fancy description there)

I am tending to lean towards the first pattern as it is a beautiful look, but I really do like skirts, so maybe will do the blouse from the first and the skirt from the second.

Some issues with using vintage patterns in this project:   modern day fabric is mostly available in 54"  & 60" widths.  The yardage on the back of these is 39" and 35".  Thank goodness for the internet and quick google searches!   I found this yardage conversion chart, so that problem can easily be solved - The 4 1/2 yards of 35" fabric needed for the skirt works out to be 3 1/8 in 54".

Another issue is the waist sizes.... I've found on these as well as many of the 50's patterns that they are made for women with teeny tiny waists.   Now I don't consider myself a large person.  My waist is 29",  the largest waist size I find listed is 28", which by their imaginary person proportions has a 37" bust, and I know THAT ain't so with me!  The "ideal" for the woman back then was a small waist,  but given that patterns were supposed to be developed for real people, not ideals, were the women actually that small?    Kind of makes me feel like an amazon giantess. I will have to put my alteration skills to good use for this to 'make it work.'

A third interesting thing, and really more of an observation, was given that this time period was supposed to be one of frugality,  I find these looks seem to require large volumes of fabric.   Now one could make a hypothesis that since the patterns I'm using are post war (1947) that the country was aiming to get back to normal and going to the other extreme to convince people of that ["Go forth and buy large amounts of fabric because everything is going to be alright. No, really..."]
Or perhaps it was a subtle way of boosting the economy by getting people to spend more? Another possibility is perhaps Vogue being higher end, might be putting forth the idea that luxury = massive amounts of fabric.     I will have to research some earlier patterns from the 40's to see if it is the same with them.

Which leads me to another issue to consider.  In being thrifty minded for this project, I would like to use fabric that I already have - both of these looks call for 3- 4 yards of fabric for the lower portion (either the trousers or the skirt)     Usually when I buy fabric, if not with a specific pattern in mind, I rarely buy more than a yard or two, so the chances of my having 4 yards of anything laying around are probably not very good.....   Will have to do some creative thinking about this.

I am very much looking forward to this Sewing for Victory challenge, I will let you know how my looks are progressing. I hope that some of you will join too!

Have you done a sew-along in the past?  What for and what were the results?  Please share if you can!
Thanks for reading!