Long-sleeved Dress, c.1928

Back to the Women in Railroad program: a dress for a Pullman maid in the 1920s. There are actually a few decent reference images, and I was also able to access the company's guidelines for maids. It was thus clear that interpreter needed a plain black dress accessorized with a white apron, cuffs, collar, and cap/frill. 

 

Dora Holloway (center) with her recent trainees.
From The Pullman News, January 1924.

The dresses in the contemporary photographs are mostly covered by the aprons, or else have their details disappear in the grayscale. I wanted a pattern with the classic 1920s silhouette, and from the photograph we see that the maids' dresses had high necks, long sleeves, and hemlines near the lower-calf.

The pattern illustration.

I ended up using the "girls dress" from the 1928 Haslan Dresscutting Book No. 5 as the basis for this project. It had the right kind of sleeve, and I liked how the pleated insets in the skirt allow for ease of motion while preserving the smooth line of the front. By changing the self-fabric collar to a detachable white collar, I was able to make it closer to the reference: I thought this dress's collar shape looked a lot like the one worn by Nellie Davidson (front row, third from right) in the photograph above. I also changed the front buttons to hooks-and-eyes, omitted the belt, lengthened the skirt, and drafted a simple trapezoidal white cuff to baste onto the sleeves' self-fabric cuffs. While I drafted the dress, my colleague made the frill and apron (we split the dress construction).

Again, a dress I can't light.

Wool Crepe Dress, 1934

I'm finally catching up with documenting all the sewing projects from this month. Most of them were for a multi-era living history event about women in the railroad, so it was an exciting opportunity to branch out of my usual time periods.

First up: a 1930s dress for alleged train robber Laura Bullion. The only reference photos I could find for her were from 1901 (at the time of her arrest) or earlier, but as we needed an older impression looking back on her life, we decided to place the interpreter in the 1930s, when Laura was working as a seamstress and hiding her youthful affiliation with Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch. 

Including the pattern illustration because
the photographs really don't show the seam lines.

I chose this simple "tennis frock" from the 1934 Haslan Spring Supplement No. 4. This was my first attempt to use that drafting system for someone other than myself. I ended up needing to enlarge the sleeves (as usual), and somehow between the muslin and final fabric the bodice gained 4" around, but overall I found it much more positive experience than trying to customize a standard-size pattern.

The whole garment is made of brown wool crepe, which I think worked very well for this dress. The fabric drapes very nicely along the figure, if not on my poor dress form. I had originally intended to use a side zipper for closer fit, but found that the fabric stretches enough to fit closely without any fasteners. The one drawback was that the fabric rolled and flopped too much to construct the neck bow (even top-stitching around the edges of each tie couldn't stabilize it enough). Also the color, unfortunately, doesn't photograph well in any of the lighting I could contrive.

 

This is the best photograph I could manage.