The Joan Dress construction drawing
When trying to get my head around how a dress or piece of clothing is pieced together I like to make some construction drawing sketches. These basically show the construction of the garment, where the seams are supposed to go, where the garment is tightly fitted and where it is flary, if there are any darts or other forms defining features.
The front of the dress is pretty straightforward. It features a pencil skirt, waistband and a shirt like bodice with a sculpted collar.
I can see two large bust darts, crossing the bust slightly right of the bust point and ending somewhere above that point. The bust point is the point in your bust that is the fullest, most protruding part.
The shoulder seams are not on top of the shoulder but at a slanting angle some cm down from the shoulder. This lets me to believe that there will be some form of yoke at the back of the dress. (a technique often seen in Safari shirts,...)
The bodice has arms that extend right to the elbow and are close fitting.
The most important part however is the crossing wrap like fabric. Which ends on the right side into a folded over collar and on the left side in a loose decorative flap.
The waistband:
seems to sit really snugly in the picture, bodice fabric seems to hang over it a bit. This feature accentuates the hourglass figure of the dress.
Skirt:
A rather regular pencil skirt with three slanting pleats in stead of darts at the top to give the skirt it's fullness. Pleats are all in the side quarters of the skirt.
back:
Since I have only one picture of the Joan dress, had to imagine / design the back myself.
As I said I expect the use of a yoke in the back, and of course two darts to match the design of the front body. I added an ornament to the waistband at the back for closure off the dress (I will explain in a moment). And added the same pleats as in the front. Realising then that there has to be some booty room in the back of the skirt I added some more, all slanted and getting progressively larger. I probably will change that in the future though.
Closing:
I suspect the dress on the picture is probably closed with a zipper from the side and the front is just a fake wrap dress with the front being stitched down invisibly by stitching a facing (dotted lines on the picture) for the front part to the back part. I might just do that but I got another crazy idea too. Use a zipper in that front seam and make the waistband wrap around and snap shut at the center back. That way it really is an easy step into wrap dress, without any risk of 'unwrapping'.
Labels: construction, dresses, Joan, mad men, pattern making
posted by Copy Cat Craziness @ 23:32
1 Comments
1 Comments:
How wonderful!
I love to do that too, I see somebody wearing something that like, I make a sketch and then spend days trying to deceipher how they did it.
It's a little bit frustrating not to always have an image of the back, but I like the way you imagined yours. Thanks for the post,
Miss J.
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