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One Dress in Two Days

If you're a lindy hopper or huge classic movie fan, you've at least seen the clip of Jean Veloz dancing in Swing Fever (1943) on YouTube. I've played this video numerous times, to the point where my husband knows the first few seconds of the video playing.

One Girl and Two Boys is a fabulous song performed by Marilyn Maxwell while Jean Veloz dances her heart out with two handsome men in uniform.

**Swoons over men in uniform**

I had made the plan in my head to make the dress Marilyn Maxwell wears in the dance scene for my birthday, months ago.

But have I mentioned I am the Queen of Procrastination? My birthday was Friday the 27th and that night a few friends and I planned to go dancing. So of course, I only rifled through my pattern drawer on Wednesday night, frantically messaged two seamstress friends on Facebook for help, and cut out my pattern.

My husband stayed in the living room, shaking his head at me, I might add.

Oh! I forgot to tell you! There wasn't a pattern to make this dress. Silly me. I had to piece together a couple patterns to use as a base for my bodice and skirt.

These vintage patterns were the best and closest I had to make this dream dress come true.

Another hurdle I had was since this was a movie, lacking any sort of photos online I might add (Thanks for nothing Google), I took screen shots from the YouTube video for what this dress looked like.

Another problem was this movie was in black and white, not easy to pick out the ONE dress I want to copy among the shades of black and white. I didn't get a good look sadly of what the entire dress looked like. Since it was from 1943, the safest bet was an A-Line skirt.

I had to change the front bodice to be on a centerfold, the back to open with a zip, make the front skirt on fold as well... I also miscalculated and had to have such a tiny seam allowance on the sides of the skirt I almost had a heart-attack.

A frantic phone call to my sister, she visited me after supper and helped me pin it flat on my body and adjust the zipper and give her two cents. After some encouraging words, I felt ten times better and left it for the night. Friday morning I foolishly sewed in my zipper with only pins in it... Did I tell you this fabric had stretch in it? **Sigh** My best friend, aka, seam ripper, and I took the zipper out then re-pinned it, BASTED it and put it in.

My patient and amazing husband helped me adjust the criss-cross cords across my chest, probably cursing my name in his head and held back the nerve to smack some sense into me for being so last minute. But he didn't. I think I'll keep him.

So in less than 48 hours, I had my dress done. Literally half an hour before we had to leave for Montreal to dance at Cat's Corner, I was hand-stitching a button to the back neckline for a closure and one of the cords in my criss-cross had slipped while I machine stitched it and became loose. All in all, I am ten thousand times proud of my dream dress.

As you can see I opted out of the long sleeves because I planned to wear this dancing. I left it as cap-sleeves (giving myself much less work and stress) and add a belt. In my picture it looks like the neckline is sweetheart, but it isn't, I kept it square.

One of my best friends joined me dancing that night which meant a lot to me. It really wasn't her scene and she made a huge effort to make sure I had a fabulous birthday which I am forever grateful for. I did however have to promise to go to a dirt-bike show with her next summer in exchange. She took this great photo of us as well as a photo of me on the dance floor.