AofD: A Dart with Fulness on One Side, pt. 1

Y’all, I made an INCREDIBLY nerdy discovery.

This sewing technique (“A Dart with Fulness on One Side”) is NOT actually used in the official, original, authored-by-Mary-Brooks-Picken version of The One Hour Dress.

Are you as shocked as I am? (probably not. I have no illusions that anyone else cares about this stuff.) But there are TONS of modern sketches and blog posts and even workshops out there teaching that the basic “One Hour Dress” gathers into a hip dart.

Which only really matters if you decide that you’re going to explore a sewing technique used in the infamous “One Hour Dress”, and then you hunt through multiple editions of the book, looking for where to use the technique, and it’s nowhere to be found.

Don’t get me wrong – the one-piece “One Hour Dress” does show a similar version with hip fullness, but that extra material is pleated into the sideseam. And there *is* a dart at the hip, but *the fabric is not slashed open to create that dart*. This means that you’re never required to the tricky bit of sewing of gathering or pleating a longer piece of fabric into a shorter piece (and having to clean finish and reinforce that slashed point at the tip of the dart).

Hip fullness is allowed in the original one-piece “One Hour Dress”,
but the main body of the fabric is not slashed into.
Source: http://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/html/warm/H-SW007-04.htm

The good news is, that sewing technique *does* pop up in all sorts of other 1920s styles, including “Draping and Designing with Scissors and Cloth”, which was ALSO published by the Women’s Institute, ALSO in 1924, and also likely written by Mary Brooks Picken. Just don’t be surprised when you go looking in the original “One Hour Dress” books and the construction is different from the sketches you see floating around on Pinterest.

So let’s look at places where this technique WAS used!

These examples all come from various Women’s Institute publications. This “Dart with Fulness on One Side” technique seems to have been most popular in the early and mid 1920’s, when straight, tubular fashion was at its height. By the late 1920s, it appears to fall out of favor as more shaped designs were considered chic.

From “Draping and Designing with Scissors and Cloth”, 1924
From “Draping and Designing with Scissors and Cloth”, 1924
From “Draping and Designing with Scissors and Cloth”, 1924
From “Fashion Service Women’s Institute Magazine”, Spring/Summer 1921
From “Fashion Service Women’s Institute Magazine”, Spring/Summer 1924
From “Fashion Service Women’s Institute Magazine”, July 1927

I’ve already finished my sewing sample of this technique, and I like it pretty well! I will share the actual sewing in my next post. 🙂