50’s style dress? or Keebler elf doppelganger

I’m sure some of you all have discovered Kollabora by now, its a newer website that is sort of a Pinterest for sewing, craft and knitting projects. I’d tell you to follow me on there but I haven’t posted anything, not sure if I’ll ever get around to that. Anyhow I found this amazing 50’s style dress made by Allyson at By a Thin Thread and I basically became obsessed, the side scallops, the flared skirt, the jungle green cotton… gah! I had to make it myself, an exact replica of course. I hunted down the pattern on etsy, Butterick 5772  circa 1951. It buttons down the sides with scallops and flares at the hem

The assembly of this dress was interesting… I made scallops when I sewed up the Colette Meringue skirt but the technique used was completely different. Here’s a picture of my meringue skirt, I wasn’t too crazy with how it turned out so I never got around to blogging it.

The scallops on the Meringue were actually cut into the pattern and you invert them with the facing and press. I had some trouble getting mine to look more rounded and less pointy at the ends, I think cutting the pieces more defined and prominent would have remedied the problem. For the Butterick dress the pattern istructed to interface the sides, draw the scallops onto the dress, sew through the line drawing and then cut them out around the stitching. At that point you invert the scallops and press them in place. Seems a little counter intuitive but surprisingly I found that this technique worked very well and my scallops looked way better than the skirt did. I’m sure the interfacing stablized them and helped out too, but still.

I ended up removing two scallops off the bottom (I am a shrimp afterall) and the bust was way huge, I took in the darts and sides a lot, and probably could take them in even more to be honest. The buttonholes and buttons themselves were definitely time consuming as you can imagine. I think I should have saved all this time and worked on something more practical because as soon as I put the dress on my husband started laughing and said “You look like a Keebler elf!”  At first I was offended but then the more I looked at it I realized, yeah he’s kind of right. Maybe its the neckline, or (obviously) the green, or maybe I need to ditch the belt but the overall effect definitely has that Keebler feel to it. Maybe I should wear the dress to the grocery and carry around a tray of cookies and be the Keebler sampler lady. I wonder how much that gig would pay?

See the resemblance? eh… oh well c’est la vie. I did like how the scallops turned out, button placement might be a little off but an easy fix.

I did enjoy the process of making this dress and learning some new-old techniques, it was rather interesting. But probably won’t attempt this one again, at least not for a while. For now I am on to go eat some softbatch cookies 😉