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East­er Dress 2014: Mad Men, Retro & Babcha Inspired

Pub­lished 03/16/2014

 A Few Notes About the Video

Before I begin shar­ing my project, I want say thank you to my old friend from Notre Dame friend, Pat McKillen. He gave me per­mis­sion to use his song Found for my video. Even though it’s one of his old­er songs, it’s still one of my favorites as it seems to cap­ture my jour­ney over the years. Some of my oth­er favorites include: Car­ry On Car­o­line, Cov­er Time After Time, and Cov­er Gal­way Girl.

It’s been a year since my babcha (grand­moth­er) passed away.

One would guess that my dai­ly life wouldn’t have been affect­ed so much liv­ing so far away from her. I was not one of her devot­ed care­tak­ers. Nev­er­the­less my life has changed quite a bit.  In all aspects of my life, I have seen my hard work pay off and show results. Coin­ci­dence? I think not. I have no doubt that Babcha has lent a hand in some way.

With Ash Wednes­day, it was time for me to start my annu­al East­er dress. There was no ques­tion that Babcha was my inspi­ra­tion – but with an unusu­al twist.  This year I’m  incor­po­rat­ing Mad Men fash­ion to the dress, and par­tic­i­pat­ing in Julia Bobbin’s Mad Men Chal­lenge. (I don’t watch Mad Men, but the out­fits inspired me!)

For about a week, I was set on a col­lared dress design. (I don’t want to share my first design because I hope to make it in the future!) But when I start­ed look­ing through my fab­ric, I real­ized I should use my babcha’s vin­tage flo­ral fabric.

Last July I start­ed mak­ing a dress from this fab­ric, but I ulti­mate­ly scratched the dress because it looked too dat­ed and vintage.

But now – this fab­ric is exact­ly what I’m look­ing for!

With my vin­tage look­ing fab­ric laid out on the table, I gath­ered ideas from the web & vin­tage Pin­ter­est boards.

Below are the pho­tos and details that caught my eye and inspired my over­all look.

 

At first, I want­ed a sil­hou­ette sim­i­lar to my black vel­vet Christ­mas dress and the Chanel dress worn by Keira Knight­ly, but with a long fit­ted skirt. I envi­sioned the top lay­er of the bodice hav­ing an asym­met­ri­cal design using the flo­ral stripes from my babcha’s fabric.

I start­ed with Burdastyle’s boned strap­less dress pat­tern. Before drap­ing the loose bodice piece on the strap­less dress, I checked the fit of the dress.

As always, I had lim­it­ed time to make this dress. I skipped the step of mak­ing a mock-up in hopes of sav­ing a lot of time and mon­ey. I have con­sis­tent­ly worn the same size in Bur­dastyle Pat­terns, so I thought I would have no prob­lem. But this time, the dress didn’t fit. The hips were too tight!!

I didn’t have enough fab­ric to cut a new CF skirt pan­el. Instead, I added a flo­ral stripe down the front of the skirt.  I don’t real­ly like the stripe, but it did its job and now the skirt fits!

 The stripe down the front of the skirt threw me off! I felt that my orig­i­nal bodice design wouldn’t work with the new skirt.

Ulti­mate­ly, I decid­ed to keep the dress sim­ple and make a bolero jack­et using the flo­ral fab­ric instead.

I mod­i­fied a Bur­dastyle jack­et pat­tern for my bolero jack­et. I designed the bolero as I went along and didn’t have a spe­cif­ic style or design in mind.

In the end, I was very hap­py with the final bolero design and construction.

In con­clu­sion,  my dress looked very dif­fer­ent from the Mad Men dress­es I orig­i­nal­ly picked out. But  if I had to choose, I could see Joan wear­ing this out­fit.  This is crazy because I orig­i­nal­ly set out to make some­thing Megan Drap­er would wear!