One green bottle dress – my last project for 2015! (Pauline 51212 c. 1940s)

One green bottle dress – my last project for 2015! (Pauline 51212 c. 1940s)

Happy holidays everyone! I hope you’re keeping well.

Unfortunately my new job is eating up my spare time (meaning not much time time left for knitting and sewing) but I’m still beavering away – just more slowly.

My fingers were really itching to have a crack at one more outfit before 2015 finished… So let me introduce Pauline 51212!

This dress is the bee’s knees!
It has so many details that I adore in 1940’s patterns: gathers, shirring, bell sleeves and why have one button when you can have twelve?

Can I let you in on a little secret? This dress isn’t a woven or even a rayon knit – it’s cotton tshirt jersey from the Spotlight clearance section!

I know!
I was directly inspired by the dress American Duchess made in cotton jersey (she has some great tips too), it’s not really all that different from wool, silk or rayon jersey which was pretty common during the 1930s and 1940s.

I did modify the pattern a little bit, including:

• Doing a Full Bust Adjustment and then easing the side dart back into the gathered fullness above the bust.
• Adding width to the hips and waist
• Adding width to the bicep (yep, even with stretch fabric they had tiny arms back then)
• Interfacing under the buttons
• Adding small shoulder pads
• Turning the extra fullness from the sleeve heads into gathers