1940's Dress

 Stage one:  The pattern.   My inspiration for the 1940's dress came from three different sources.  First EvaDress's site with the pattern for a 1939 day or evening gown.  Next was this beauty from the late 1930's/early 1940's as well.  And finally this one from the early 1940's:

I love the waist line and the gathers to the front.  For the skirt pattern, I designed it myself using a mix of drafting and draping.

The pattern was a bit on the short skirt side so I added a few inches to the hem.    The skirt itself came out like this:

 Yes, my dress dummy wears a bra.  The skirt came out fairly well so I went on to drape the blouse.

 The draping of the blouse went well so I cut the blouse out....

 And that's where things started to get a bit hairy.  I'm going to have to chop the sleeves - I didn't have quite enough material for a full sleeve and the bottom part of the sleeve is now slightly too tight.  It's an easy fix and one I can save until the morning.   The gathers just didn't look quite right here - I had to pin them to get a decent picture, so on to take two.

 Slightly better, but you can probably see the gather on the left side of the photo looks funky.  So take three...and four...and five....

 And finally I got something reasonable.  In this photo and the one below, the blouse is finished.  I had to keep unpicking and restitching the blouse to the skirt to get it to lay correctly over the chest.  It finally does.

It's a bit boxy but so are all 1940's fashions.  I added a zipper to the side.  Zippers are period - they were called slide fasteners.

If I get enough time tomorrow, I'd like to make a short jacket to go with the dress.  Like I said, I'm going to have to chop the sleeves but this is what it looks like right now.