Vogue 1844 is my September Minerva Brand Ambassador make. You’ve seen the sneak peeks and this is the reveal post.

The pattern is part of my sponsored posts as Minerva is promoting Vogue patterns in September. After watching The Queens Gambit, it was easy to choose this classic navy and white contrast with silver buttons.

As you can see in on the pattern, the hem length is mid thigh level. In the 60s that would have been seen as frumpy. I remember Mum telling me that when mod dresses were in, at her workplace they had to install modesty screening at their desks. That’s how short dresses were at the height of that era.

My test version is really useful to wear as I used duller colours and linen fashion fabric.

This version uses a swishy crepe fashion fabric. This crepe is light and flows really well. This version has a cotton lining for the front and back of the dress. I love the swishy crepe character of this fabric but I also want the dress to not stick to me, hence the cotton lining.

I’ve used a white interfacing for the neck band. This keeps the neck band looking more white against the navy crepe fabric.

This crepe has black threads on the weft so it’s a very dark navy colour. This keeps this timelessness of dress as do the shiny silver buttons. I’ve used black thread to sew this crepe so I could see the stitching when I needed to unpick the seams.

I’ve used 3 thread overlocking for the sleeves and armhole finishes.

What I learned with the test dress is to avoid using buttons with a shank. I also learned that I can use a 35cm invisible zipper rather than a 55cm invisible zipper. That’s because of the A line shaping of this dress.

I was very tempted to add darts for the waist to get more definition and again, I’ve held back from changing the original design of this dress.

I’ve added more shaping as the side seams and at centre back waist. Yes I unpicked the zipper and added in the shaping at the side seams, but not much.