APB on a BDP (BDP = Bridal Dress Pattern)

Jen at MOMSPatterns is trying to help a customer find the dress on this pattern -- not this actual pattern, which is for fabric roses -- but the dress that Vogue used as a canvas in the picture on this pattern envelope for the flowers that this pattern makes. Is that clear?

We're assuming that the marketing whizzes at Vogue would use one of their own patterns ON one of their own patterns, but nobody's been able to find this yet. Can you help?

Speaking of brides, I'm going to be a bridesmatron again in May! I'm very excited. [Not-so-interesting Erin trivia: thus far I have only stood up in the weddings of people named "Vanessa".] This is the dress my bride-to-be has chosen for us -- I really like it:




(NOTE: She is not getting it in BLACK. You guys know how I feel about that, and anyway, it's a May wedding. But you know what? If she asked me to wear black I would so totally do it. I even offered to wear purple if she wanted me to, and purple and I don't get along.)

This dress is from Watters -- does anyone have any helpful tips for dealing with them? They're saying "ten weeks"; is that for real, or a nervous-bride-buffer?

Name That Pattern!

Deborah writes in with a plaintive request: does anyone know what the pattern number is of the McCalls pattern on the cover of Blueprints of Fashion?

If you know (or better yet, if you HAVE) this pattern, please leave a comment ... I *think* I've seen this one before, but considering I can't even remember the number of the Walk-Away Dress, there's no way I'd ever be able to pull three or four digits out of my noggin for this one.

And to continue my unbroken string of sales announcements, there's a sale at Specialist Auctions, starting today:

Meet Our Advertisers #7: Specialist Auctions

How long have you been in business?
Specialist Auctions Vintage section opened in June of 2006 but the site itself opened late in 2005.

What motivated you to go into the vintage and pattern auction business? We had a request from Margaret Bolger of Artizania to open a vintage and antique clothing section. In December of 2006 our current moderator, Margaret Leyden, joined us as a seller and co-moderator of the Vintage and Antique Clothing Section and is the moderator at this time and a member of the Vintage Fashion Guild.

Where are you based? Specialist Auctions is based in the UK but we are truly an international site with more than 50% of our sellers based in the U.S. We have vintage clothing, vintage textiles and vintage pattern sellers from Lapland, the UK, Peru and the US.

what's the weirdest/best/craziest/most beautiful thing you've ever found?
There are so many beautiful things at Specialist Auctions Vintage it would be a sin to pick just one so I'll give you four:
this zebra hostess gown from Wyoming Vintage
this 1936 home sewing magazine from Memories Past
this champagne satin party dress from Alley Cats Vintage
this popover duster dress pattern from Henrietta's Pearl Button
and, from our newest vintage pattern store, this adorable vintage jacket pattern from RetroMonde Vintage Patterns


What do you wish someone would ask you about your site?
How did we have the nerve to set the site up in the first place ?

It's a good day at work when ...
We have new sellers come on board and watch them have success with selling their items. It's also great to see buyers come on board and be pleased with their purchases and the service they receive.

The pattern at the top of this post is also from RetroMonde ...

If this wasn't enough Specialist Auction Action for you, check out Marge's blog, where she's been profiling SA sellers all week, in slideshows.

APB on 4743

I don't usually put out pattern calls (because otherwise that's all I'd do, and because putting out pattern calls often alerts folks that a particularly desirable pattern EXISTS, which usually leads to even more people looking for it, benefiting the original pattern-coveter not a whit) but I am making an exception in this case because 1) it's for a wedding, specifically Shannon's wedding, and 2) it is completely freaking gorgeous.

So, if you have a line on this pattern, will you let me know? Or if you know of a modern equivalent, or something that could be altered into a reasonable facsimile of this pattern ...

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, I don't know how many of y'all Twitter, but I have decided that it would be a Very Funny Idea if I were to twitter as Fake Diana Vreeland, sending out "Why Don't You ..." tweets (both some of her original ones and new ones in her "style") at irregular intervals. If you are on Twitter and want to follow Fake Diana Vreeland, she is here. (I also tweet random words at this Twitter account.)

Also: to come later this week: the return of the Meet Our Advertisers feature!

Great Dresses of Mediocre Literature, Meta-Discussion

Reader Lynn is looking for fiction that describes twentieth-century older women and their clothes, which reminded me of the wonderful descriptions of clothes (on women of all ages) in the novels of Kathleen Norris, like this one:

Only the wearers and their dress-makers knew what hours had been spent upon these costumes, what discouraged debates attended their making, what muscular agonies their fitting. Only they could have estimated, and they never did estimate -- the time lost over pattern books, the nervous strain of placing this bit of spangled net or that square inch of lace, the hurried trips downtown for samples and linings, for fringes and embroideries and braids and ribbons. The gown that she wore to her own dinner, Mrs. White had fitted in the Maison Dernier Mot, in Paris; -- it was an enchanting frock of embroidered white illusion, over pink illusion, over black illusion, under a short heavy tunic of silver spangles and threads. The yoke was of wonderful old lace, and there was a girdle of heavy pink cords, and silver clasps, to match the aigrette that was held by pink and silver cords in Mrs. White's beautifully arranged hair.

Mrs. Burgoyne's gowns, or rather gown, for she wore exactly the same costume to ever dinner, could hardly have been more startling than Santa Paloma found it, had it gone to any unbecoming extreme. Yet it was the simplest of black summer silks, soft and full in the skirt, short-sleeved, and with a touch of lace at the square-cut neck. She arranged her hair in a becoming loose knot, and somehow managed to look noticeably lovely and distinguished, in the gay assemblies. To brighten the black gown she wore a rope of pearls, looped twice about her white throat, and hanging far below her waist; pearls, as Mrs. Adams remarked in discouragement later, that "just made you feel what's the use! She could wear a kitchen apron with those pearls if she wanted to, everyone would know she could afford cloth of gold and ermine!"

From The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne (review here; For a contemporary account of Kathleen Norris, look here).

Do you have a favorite author for descriptions of dress, especially descriptions of twentieth-century dress? (Georgette Heyer is great for Regency dress, at least to read -- I have no idea how accurate her depictions are, but I'm sure someone will tell me!) Please leave your recommendations in the comments ...

Etsy's loss is your gain

Jace (at Gremly Girl) recently let me know of a change to Etsy's search that I wasn't aware of ... the new default Etsy search is for handmade items only:




So if you search, say, "fauxlero" on Etsy, without changing the default to "Vintage" ... well, you wouldn't get much. Then you would believe there are no fake boleros on Etsy, and, considering how many fake-bolero links I've been sent in the past 24 hours, that's un-possible.

In order to make it worth your while to change the little drop-down in the search box from "handmade" to "vintage" (see below)




a bunch of Etsy sellers have banded together to offer a special "Buried Treasure" promotion. They're offering 10% off through the end of May to Dressaday readers who put "dressaday" in the message to sellers. The site won't input the discount automatically, so buyers will get a revised Paypal invoice from the seller. (Some pattern sellers offer additional shipping and quantity discounts, which they'll combine with the dressaday discount.)

Here's the list of participating Etsy sellers, in alphabetical order:

Bamabelle -- vintage clothing
Enigma Vintage -- vintage clothing
Gremly Girl -- vintage patterns
Joules -- vintage clothing and patterns
Just Picked Vintage -- vintage patterns & notions
Pattern Mania -- vintage patterns
Pattern Shop -- vintage patterns
Pattern Stash -- vintage patterns
Sandritocat -- vintage patterns

I suggest you take advantage of the discount by perhaps snapping up something like this:




Or this:




It'd be a shame to let those dresses languish, undiscovered and almost undiscoverable, just because Etsy changed their search ...

Thanks, Adorn

Many thanks to Susan Beal for including A Dress A Day in her "This Just In" roundup in the new issue of Adorn. It's nice to be in such good company!

Y'all Are Too Nice To Me

Seriously. You leave me nice comments, you send me fun links, and now you buy me fabric. Anna at BootyVintage saw this amazing fabric on eBay, noticed that it was "BuyItNow", decided that no one but me deserved to own it, and bought it right there on the spot!

I *am* the luckiest woman on the planet, dontcha know?

Of course I paypal-ed her posthaste, and soon this amazing fabric will indeed be mine, all mine. Fabric I did not even know existed, and is my favorite color green, to boot (so many alphabet fabrics are pale blue and pale pink, for the nursery).

So now I just have to find a pattern that will let me put a giant "e" right at the center front, and I will have achieved alphabet-dress nirvana.

Oh, and this dress? Arrived MONDAY. Not that I've had time to do much more than gaze lovingly at it in stolen moments ...

name that (dress) tune

Reader Rebecca has written in to ask for help identifying a song about a dress (she found me through this post, I bet).

She says:

I heard the song on the Thistle and Shamrock NPR show years ago. The story of the song seemed to be a girl asking her mother what dress she should wear, and the mother offering various reasons why she shouldn't. I believe in the last verse they come back to the dress from the first verse, and realizing that there's nothing else to wear, the girl and mother finally agree.

She's already googled the heck out of it ... anyone know it out of their actual heads?

(The image is just a random piece of sheet music from eBay ... not the song being hunted.)

Black and Pink Stripes?

Despite my own penchant for bright grass green, which I would venture to guess is the Anti-Goth color (brimming as it is with life and vulgar cheerfulness), I have a not-so-secret fondness and admiration for the Full-On Goth. I really, really love Goth fashion, in all its varieties, but probably my Favorite Goth is the Lady of the Manners, who runs Gothic Charm School. (That's her, right there on the left.)

And because the Lady of the Manners has such exquisite fashion sense, she is often hindered by the lack of availability of certain items, since manufacturers are either unaware of the demand for such things, or unwilling to cater to those so far avant of the garde. So she asked me for help in tracking down a particular fabric, and I, in turn, am asking all of you.

Does anyone know of a source for black and "cupcake pink" (see why the Lady is my favorite Goth?) WIDE striped fabric? The stripes, ideally, would be more than 3/8th of an inch wide.

The Lady of the Manners needs at least five yards, because the envisioned dress includes a bustle. (Oh, my heart!)

It has been suggested that the Lady of the Manners buy black and WHITE fabric, and dye it, but, perfectionist that she is, she is afraid that she wouldn't be able to dye it evenly. So she waits for the right fabric to come along.

And -- this request got me thinking. If I put up a quick-wiki/bulletin board page of "fabric requests" would you folks visit it, both to post requests and to help fulfill them? Does such a thing exist anywhere else? I wouldn't provide any kind of ecommerce support -- you'd have to email each other and make arrangements for sales and swaps yourselves -- but would simply having such a space be helpful? Let me know in the comments.

Any Chinese Translation Help?

Dress A Day reader Erma's husband is a non-native speaker of Chinese and a linguistics professor, and he has a dress-related translation question. Does anyone know the meaning of the Chinese character bai3 (摆)? It's used in compounds such as qun2bai3 (裙摆), where qun2 means skirt. It was used in a sentence which translates to something like "Under the rustling of the evening breeze, the entire bai3 of the skirt was billowing".

The dictionary defines bai3 as "hem or lower part". But a native speaker told Erma's husband that bai3 refers to width -- a narrow skirt has a "small bai3" and a wide skirt has a "big bai3".

Anyone have some input? I have to say, if we figure this one out, I'm going to steal that word into English and use it to refer to this concept all the time. "I only wear skirts with big bai," I'll say.

[The image is an artwork called "Memory Dress" by Yu Hong.]