After a long hiatus, I finally return, this time with a rough tutorial for Vogue's vintage pattern 2903! It isn't perfect, but I haven't found any blog that's discussed the whole pattern. At least as of August, I couldn't find anyone who got to the facings and yoke, the parts of the pattern that give everyone trouble. Well, I'm not sure how much this will help, but hopefully it will!
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| Vogue 2903 |
Note, this isn't going to be a complete step-by-step. There are a few parts I didn't document too well or skipped, but I tried to cover the trickiest parts.
For the first time ever, I did a proper mock-up for this dress, so that's what this tutorial covers. Anyway, I started off just laying out the pattern. I wasn't too worried about getting it perfect since I had a ton of muslin.
Sewing up the long seams is pretty easy overall, but the princess seams (the front side seams over the bust) can be a little tricky. All patterns recommend you clip curves, but I've had a ton that I could get away with very little clipping. To that end, I'm not all that great with it, but this pattern required it. BIG TIME. You will not be able to sew these without clipping, and I found I had to clip a lot to get piece 1 to line up with piece 2--you're essentially clipping to turn a concave curve into a convex.
Note: do like most people who've learned how to sew properly, and put your pins perpendicular to the seam. This pattern slowly got me doing that a lot more frequently.
Once you get these seams stitched up, the pattern has an interesting direction: "Stitch along stitching line between small circles." You can see the marks on the pattern, but the instruction seems pointless. This stitching line is to help you form the pleats in the skirt, so, technically, you can skip this step if you don't want the sharp pleats. A lot of people have chosen to skip this and the other pleat steps, and I ultimately skipped it in the final dress. Still, if you want to try it, this is what the stitching line basically looks like. Unfortunately, I don't have photos of the pleats I tried on the mock-up, but other bloggers have covered the pleats.
It's a little hard to see, even with the pink thread, so I traced the seams and marked where the circles were with little lines. The arrowed line is the main seam, and the short, straight line is the stitching line.
The zipper is a pretty standard hidden zipper, and there are a ton of good tutorials online for this, so I won't cover it. Once you get the hand of it, it's actually quite easy.
I cheated for the mock-up and just used a cheap plastic zipper I'd gotten as a crafting hand-me-down. I didn't even bother sewing around the mechanism in this case. Tsk tsk
And now we get to the facing. This starts one of the several parts that everyone seems to have trouble with, and it's understandable. The instructions are pretty confusing and different from any other pattern I've ever worked with. But if you take your time and read carefully, it's actually not too bad.
First, sew the center seam of the facing pieces, and do your best to hit the small circle accurately. You don't want a gap happening in the centerpoint as you progress.
Now, press the shoulder to the wrong side of the facing, 5/8" of an inch. (This might actually come first in the instructions, but it doesn't really matter.) If you need to shorten the top/shoulders (which I did on the final version), you can actually take it in by pressing this in further, but be careful that you're accurate on all the facing pieces, front and back.
When you sew this seam, do your best to hit the end of your stitching (at the circle) on the facing's center seam. If you don't, try to hand-stitch the little left of the center seam or redo the sewing you just did. If it's a small gap, you might not notice it when you flip the facing inside, but it can be annoying nonetheless.
Once you've sewn that seam (your neckline, basically), you sew the other side of the strap down to the circle on the pattern (I'm using the bottom pin to mark the spot on mine). Note how on the neckline side, my stitching has gone across the pressed part of the shoulder--this is necessary.
And voila! Neckline and strap stitched.
Do this for both the front and back facing, and then you're ready to move on.
Flip the facings inside the dress, and turn the straps out. Now, you'll start to see why you did the pressing. I won't tell you why yet (we aren't there yet in the pattern instructions), but this is what your project should look like at this point.
Now for another weird part. We need to attach the facing to the dress, and we do that by basically sewing the facing to the dress's seams. Note, if you have fraying fabric, this can be unforgiving. On the final version, I actually serged most of these edges, because this dress has no real lining. My mother-in-law figured out how to use the mock-up as a lining, but I didn't document it, and it had its own complications. It took us a couple of tries before we got it worked out properly.
But anyway! Sewing the facing to the dress. Here you can see where I started at the armpit. I went way outside the original seam because I had no idea what I was doing. It's okay to be a little out, but the closer you are, the better.
It's hard to see, but here's the zoomed out version of the other side. Note that you tack together the center seams. Pressing the straps and neckline throughout or before this process is a good idea. My mother-in-law had a magical sewing foot that actually stitched down the neckline on the inside to help the final version's neckline lie flat. On a lighter fabric (cotton instead of satin), this probably isn't as much of an issue.
The back.
FERRET BREAK!
Okay, moving on. Now, we can finally sew up those shoulders. Pin each front shoulder to the corresponding back, matching notches. The pressed seams will be on the outsides. Also, if you pressed the seams correctly on the facing, the pressed edges should match as perfectly as humanly possible. I'm sorry I don't have a side view so you can see it.
It's okay if there's a bit of space, but again, you want it to be as close as possible.
Now, it's a little hard to tell what's going on here, but I'm basically turning the raw edges of the seam into the little pocket created by the pressed seam of the facing. You can see on the right how I accidentally stitched through the pressed seam on that side, but because it was the mock-up, I left it and simply pushed the seam into the open side instead of redoing it and then pressing the seam open and tucking each side into its corresponding pocket. (I really hope that made sense.)
Here you can just see the notch under the pressed edge. I don't have an in-progress picture unfortunately, but at this point you slip-stitch the pressed edges together. This seals the raw shoulder seam inside the straps. It's actually pretty ingenious. But this is where you can have trouble making those pressed edges meet without stretching or bunching if you were off in your measurements before.
At this point, you can actually try your dress on without pins! I found out it was kind of a tent on me. Even though I followed the measurements exactly, I had a ton of extra space in the waist, so I knew I'd have to adjust the pattern on the final version.
Finally, we're at the yoke. This part's pretty simple. Wrong sides together, sew up the neckline, flip right-side out. Then baste/stitch/serge the outside edges.
Now we start the sleeves. First, do the cuffs and sleeves....
Flip the cuff inside and stitch it in (no pics of that last step, sorry)....
And now, you're ready to attach the sleeves to the yoke! If you choose to make the dress without sleeves, you can skip all these steps with the sleeves, but you have to make an armpit facing essentially. I chose to leave the sleeves off the final version because they didn't look good on me, and my mother-in-law made the facings (again, why didn't I document THAT?).
Note, they are inside-out, with the armpits facing the yoke.
Now, when you flip everything right-side out, it should look like this!
Now we insert the yoke and sleeves into the dress. Baste, sew, or hand-stitch the yoke to the seams of the facings. The tack at the center seam and moving from the side seams to bottom facing seam canmake machine sewing this tricky. I chose just to hand-stitch mine.
Again, this isn't a great picture, but now you sew the armpit of the sleeve to the armpit of the dress. If you've been good about matching circles and following seam allowances, this shouldn't be too difficult. If you weren't, you might have trouble at the point where the straps hit the rest of the dress (basically the connection between front and front side pieces and back and back side pieces).
Lastly, check your length and sew up your bottom hem! This pattern was super long on me. I wanted it to hit just below the knee, so I ended up altering the pattern to be about 5 inches shorter.
And we're done! Next time, I'll talk about what I did with the final version to make the final dress design unique for the wedding!
