This dress was first inspired by Sherlock Holmes. I was first introduced to the stories while I was in middle school and I was immediately hooked. I read as many of the stories as I could, and watched the BBC series as well as the Guy Ritchie movies as soon as I could get my hands on them (and then rewatched them many, many times). At first, the plan was to find a brown wool plaid, since that is the classic Sherlock Holmes fabric choice. Unfortunately, reasonably priced wool is incredibly difficult to find in Canada, especially in a weight that is appropriate for a dress. This wool was still very expensive, but it was the best one that I have found so far - it is soft enough to wear against the skin, thin enough to wear as an indoor garment, and drapey enough for the skirt not to stick out awkwardly. It was especially important that the weight was right for the pattern that I wanted to use. It features 12 tucks on both the back bodice and skirt, and I needed the fabric to be light enough that it did not add bulk and could be ironed mostly flat.
At first, I was a bit disappointed that this was the only fabric that I could find. It was not even close to the quintessential Sherlock Holmes brown tweed or plaid that I was hoping for, and it seemed really modern in my eyes. But after a while, I thought of all of the other murder mysteries that I love and realized that it somehow manages to look like the costumes of nearly every main character in them.
Recently, Endeavour has managed to overtake Sherlock Holmes in my spot as favourite detective show. This one is set in 1960's Oxford and features an opera loving detective. There are so many lovely plaid wool outfits in this show, which my costume-loving heart very happy.
Amazingly enough, this fabric matches a few of my other favourite television mystery-solvers! Murdoch, from CBC's Murdoch Mysteries, as well as Edmund Reid, from Ripper Street, both wear lovely wool suits, since both series are set in the late 1800's/early 1900's.
When I made this dress, I primarily made it over 3 days stretched out over the span of a few months. The first day I chalked in the darts and the tucks, then thread marked all of the tucks while watching copious amounts of BBC period dramas. Because the extra fabric of the tucks faced outwards like a pin tuck, I needed to be able to draw out where the sewing lines were, but I did not want to use chalk to do so since I was not totally confident that I would be able to completely get it out without having to rub the fabric too much. Thread marking is almost always the best option for these kinds of situations since they are easily visible while working and can be taken out without any trace after. The next day of sewing was spent actually sewing the tucks - since there are so many of them and I wanted to be as accurate as possible when sewing, it took quite a bit of time! The last full day of sewing was spent doing most of the construction. There were other chunks of time that I spent on this project doing pinning, hand sewing, and other little bits, but the majority of the dress came together in large swaths of concentration. I love when this happens when I am sewing, because I find that I do everything by the book when I get into these kinds of moods. If I already have the iron set up, the machine calibrated for the wool suiting, and a good show on, it is so much fun to spend time being picky and precise. With this dress it was especially important that I spent my time on each of the details to get them right, since there is a lot of skill work on this pattern. The tucks need a great deal of patience since they need to be symmetrical (with the fan shape of the placement, it is pretty easy to accidentally make them lopsided) and they have to be the right width, otherwise the back pieces would not fit correctly with the rest of the pieces. Just being 1 milimeter off on a few of the tucks can really alter the size of the dress, and since I had already made some alterations and many measurements to ensure that the dress fit me well I did not want anything to happen to jeopardize that. The front of the dress, although much more simple, still has lots to pay attention to while sewing it. I wanted as much of the dress to pattern match as possible (the center front does not, but the horizontal lines on both side seams and the shoulder seams match nearly perfectly!), and the yoke of the front was time consuming to create.
Honestly, a large part of why I wanted to pay so much attention to the detail on this dress was because it reminded me of all those famous detectives suits. Vintage suits have always had so much love and care and time put into them. Bespoke suits made today are the same way! I have so much admiration for traditional tailors, and I really found out about tailoring through some of the vintage detective shows that I have loved through the years. Murdoch Mysteries and Ripper Street have some of the most fantastic, intensly patterned 1890's suits that I have ever seen, and they made me fall in love with vintage mens tailoring. Endeavour has incredible 1960's and 70's suits that range from elegant to funky, and Sherlock has such an iconic look that it is instantly recognizable. The Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downy Jr. have steampunk looking patterned suits (actually a bit similar to Ripper Street), the Jeremy Brett version from the 1980's has the well-known deer-stalker version of Sherlock, and the BBC version has Sherlock in beautifully fitted suits. Every single one of the different detectives were very influential to my style and my childhood and I thought that it would only be fitting to spend some time making something inspired by them.
At first I had planned to make something a little more of a literal interpretation of these shows, perhaps with a skirt suit in a brown plaid. However, I always wear dresses more than I wear anything else, and if I was going to spend money on a nice wool I wanted to make something that I would want to wear constantly. When I finally ordered this Vintage Vogue pattern (which I have admired for years now), I knew that this is what I wanted to use. It has some of the utilitarian, work appropriate feeling that suits have, while including beautiful, feminine details that make it fit better into my wardrobe and style. Once I found this window pane wool, I was absolutely thrilled with the combination and excited to get working.
I am so excited about how this dress turned out! I feel like it shows how far I have come in my sewing journey since the first pieces of clothing that I made almost 10 years ago (!), and it fits in beautifully with the rest of my closet. I was also thrilled about how well it went with my new Fluevogs, which I wore in these photos! Fluevog is a Canadian shoe company with has the most fabulous, comfortable shoes, and I am sure that this outfit will get a ton of use in my future. And whats not to like about feeling like a detective in the 1890's?
Thank you for reading!
~Katherine