WW2 Gordon tartan ATS skirt

Pattern: improvised based on standard ATS skirt

Fabric: a 100% wool Gordon tartan skirt

Haberdasheries: one button, two snaps, white  petersham ribbon (4 cm wide)

As you may know from previous posts, I’ve been doing QAIMNS, VAD and WLA for a while, but more recently I’ve started getting into other WW2 women’s uniforms as well. I’ve got the well-known book World War II British Women’s Uniforms, and there’s a picture in there of an ‘ATS officer, Scottish Command’ which I thought it would be really awesome to make a Gordon version of. Which meant getting a side cap and making a kick-pleated Gordon tartan skirt!

It isn’t that easy to find the right fabric for a skirt like this, so I got an existing skirt from eBay which was basically a women’s kilt:

I took it apart and then made a pattern based on my standard ATS skirt, adding kick-pleats at all four front and back seams using this tutorial.

The fabric passed the cat test

One set of pleats close up

To create a neat skirt, I needed the yellow lines in the tartan to line up at the seams. My regular method of simply placing pins at those lines and sewing over them (carefully) didn’t work for this fabric (it moved, despite the pins) so I ended up using thin double-sides adhesive tape, which worked surprisingly well! I just sewed over it and tore the tape away afterwards.

The double-sided adhesive tape in action

This 1941 fragment of ATS girls sewing their own ‘kilts’ was of some help in making my skirt, but as I couldn’t see all the details or find any photos of an original skirt anywhere, I had to make a few assumptions. Like in the standard ATS skirt, I made a front opening with a button (black version of the standard battledress button) and two snaps and finished the waist with white petersham ribbon. Finally, I used the eBay skirt’s existing hem!

I love, love, love this uniform! I think it’s so lovely and flattering. Apparently the ATS uniform jacket didn’t live up to the wartime fashion and beauty standard at all, and people did not think was flattering at the time, as is accounted on pages 144-5 of Virginia Nicholson’s very interesting book Millions Like Us:

For a surprising number of women the main factor influencing their choice of what service to join “was the clothes. Few of them knew what to expect, so they judged on appearances. Christian Oldham (…) joined the Wrens in 1940. Years later, when she published an account of her time with the service, Christian couldn’t decide what to call it, until she casually mentioned to her editor, ‘You know, I only joined for the hat.’ They both agreed it would make the perfect title.

Christian Oldham claims to have been ‘hat-minded’ from the age of three. At twenty she was even more susceptible to the flattering double-breasted tailored jacket, svelte skirt and pert tricorne hat that comprised the officers’ uniform. Vera Laughton Mathews, director of the Wrens, had commissioned the elite fashion designer Edward Molyneux to come up with the look. ‘The effect was a winner,’ according to Christian, and entirely accounted for the huge waiting list of applicants wishing to join:

‘The great thing was, of course, that the ATS and WAAFs had these frightful belts which made their bottoms look enormous, whereas the Wrens had this nice straight uniform which concealed your worst points. Joining the Wrens was quite the most fashionable war work.’

Admittedly, the ATS uniform lacked pulling power: in truth, a single-breasted, belted khaki jacked bulked out with cumbersome pleated pockets did nothing for one’s figure. The WAAFs suffered from the same defect where pockets and belts were concerned, accentuating hips and bottoms.”

How things change! Or maybe it’s just my taste and my not overly busty and hippy figure, but the Wren (Women’s Royal Naval Service) uniform is my least favourite and I don’t think either the double breasted jacket or the hat flattering! What’s not to love about the ATS jacket, which cinches one’s waist while, indeed, adding to bust and hips? It certainly works for my 8 figure.

If you want to know more about women in the wartime services, I recommend the aforementioned Millions Like Us, a very nice read indeed!

The jacket, side cap and tie are original, the shirt and shoes are post-war military issue, the lanyard is a reproduction by my friend Anne, and the bag is from Soldier of Fortune. I certainly don’t think all their reproduction stuff is good (the ATS caps, for instance, are awful) but they did a decent job on the bag. Also, original bags tend to have lots of stains and look about as old as they are now, but I want to look like I’m wearing this uniform sometime between 1940 and 1945!

What I should add, by the way, is that these skirts, as well as the side caps, were ‘private purchase’, so non-standard items, and were only worn in Scotland, and not overseas.

Aaand when I got home I put my jacket on my ironing board to vent, and the obvious thing happened… :P

Almost Gordon 1940s Simplicity dress

Pattern: Vintage Simplicity 3417, bust 34”

Fabric: I had 3 metres; didn’t cut very economically because I pattern matched =)

Haberdasheries: Three buttons, a 30 cm zipper, a belt clasp and waist band

A few years ago I made a 1940s dress using this pattern and I wanted to use it again, but with some alterations. With hindsight, I find the bodice of that dress too long and baggy; even though it’s an authentic look for the 1940s, I just don’t like to look like I’ve got a roll of fat that I don’t! And since I don’t exactly follow today’s fashion, I hardly think I would have been without personal taste at the time ;).

I took 10 centimetres (!!!) out of the bodice width, despite this pattern being for a 34” bust, which should be slightly small for me. Simplicity patterns just had sooo much wearing ease! Because of the additional length in the bodice of my first dress, I expected that I’d have to take some length out as well, but I came to the conclusion that I must have added the additional length myself, which obviously I shouldn’t have done! So I only shortened the skirt, as I did for my first dress as well.

It took me a while to find a suitable fabric; most fabrics I saw in stores didn’t really have a ‘40s vibe for me. Until I read something about plaid (or tartan, as I prefer to call it ;)) fabrics being quite usual at the time, and I remembered this fabric that I’d seen at my local fabric store ages ago, but knowing their turnover rate, I suspected they’d still have. I like it because it’s almost Gordon dress tartan. The thin white lines should just have been yellow! And I already had a matching self-knitted cardigan.

According to the label the fabric was 80% cotton and 20% poly, but as I was working with it I thought: “yeah right!” Sadly, it doesn’t feel like cotton at all, although it can be ironed well without melting.

I pattern matched everything as well as I could, lining up the lines on the different pattern pieces by pinning them in place.

And of course, I had lots of feline sewing help! Thankfully she didn’t attack the fabric and make loops in it.

Because of the colour scheme of this fabric, for once I didn’t have difficulty finding a matchting zipper, buttons and belt fabric!

The buttons are vintage, from about the 1960s, and have a nice story to them. My grandfather was director of a button factory at the time, and my mother was sewing herself a green skirtsuit. So my grandfather had buttons made to match her fabric! I guess these were the surplus buttons; in any case, I liked using them on my dress.

 

I first wore this dress to an event in remembrance of Market Garden 1944. The re-enactment group War Department did a stunning and impressive portrayal of a field hospital, and I even got to depict a Dutch civilian helping there!

Photo by Menno Bausch

Gordon tartan skirt

Pattern: improvised

Fabric: about 70 cm wool tartan fabric and 70 cm black acetate lining fabric

Haberdasheries: an invisible zipper

This fabric was a present from my husband, bought in Edinburgh on one of our holidays in Scotland! I decided to make a contemporary skirt from it, rather than anything resembling a kilt.

The fabric was very easy to work with. Wool is easy anyway, but I could also follow the tartan pattern to cut straight, to determine the height of the waistband and the length of the skirt, and to make the pleats.

I lined the skirt with black acetate; just attached it to the tartan fabric and sewed them as one, and invisibly hemmed the skirt by folding the tartan around the lining and hand stitching it in place.

I used an invisible zipper. I’d used one before, on the previous contemporary skirt I made, but that was almost a year ago, so I didn’t really remember how I did it. This time I wanted to get it in even more invisibly, but on my first attempt I hit one tooth with my machine needle, which meant the zipper didn’t work anymore and I had to take it out again. Oh no! After that I ended up sewing the new zipper in by hand, as that gave me more control over how close to the teeth I sewed. I did my best to precisely line up all the lines in the tartan pattern, but of course some got away! Still, the skirt looks a lot more neat than most store-bought tartan and check items, which appear to be cut and sewn randomly...

This skirt turned out just how I imagined it! =)