How the Vintage Sewing Community Helped Me Connect With My Holiday Spirit
- mandymjimenez
- Dec 21, 2023
- 5 min read
I love this time of year. Christmas and the surrounding holidays have always filled me with joy and whimsy and make me want to do all kinds of special holiday activities. Up until the last few years, I always had a really hard time finding a way to connect the desire for holiday festivities with actually DOING the holiday festivities. Over the years I've occasionally had cookie baking days and shopping days, even a Christmas trip to France for my honeymoon. While fun in their own respective ways, these events never really filled out what I have always envisioned as a fully realized holiday season. About five years ago, I started putting up the tree while watching the Thanksgiving Day parade followed by the AKC dog show (for which I have accurately predicted the winner every year!). This tradition is now fully cemented for our family and I completely enjoy it. We finish off the day with pie and movies and I honestly could not think of a better way to spend Thanksgiving.
But what about the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas? I love getting holiday themed coffee drinks from my favorite places, hanging out while enjoying the Christmas tree, and shopping for presents, but that just never felt like enough engagement with the holiday season. Then I found the sewing and the vintage community. Among this group of people I have discovered the total embrace of everything this time of year has to offer. This community really shines from Halloween through the New Year, honestly, but around Christmas things are especially amazing. There are many social media "events." From 12 Days of Stitchmas to 12 Days of Vintage it's a solid month of beautiful handmade clothes of all sorts in the most whimsical, cheerful holiday fabrics you can imagine. Maybe the single best thing about this group of people is their willingness to go one hundred percent into the holiday void without ever worrying about being "too much." This spirit is true to the ideals of holiday fashions of the past, with endless pattern envelopes featuring Christmas themed aprons, catalogs full of festive house dresses, and ads with beautiful holiday party dresses. Seeing that other people find so much inspiration from the same places and get so much joy from making and wearing their holiday spirit for their own enjoyment brings me boundless happiness.
The idea of sewing my way to new and fun traditions really settled on me after I started avidly following Gretchen "Gertie" Hirsch (as mentioned in my first blog post) in fall 2021 and saw what has now become her annual holiday "extravaganza" unfold. Seeing the lovely, festive garments appear day after day not only on her Instagram, but on those of her followers as well made me realize how much Christmas I had been missing and all the ways I could start to capture it for myself. At first the possibilities felt overwhelming. I started my dressmaking adventures in summer of 2021, so this first holiday season as a garment sewer left me wanting to make everything, but without the confidence I would later develop. I decided to start small both in scope of the project and in tone of the fabrics. We had a December trip to Disneyland coming up and I knew that would be the perfect place to start tentatively testing the waters of more flamboyant garments. I settled on the Charm Patterns Patreon project, The Peter Pan Bolero. This project is designed for knits and felt more forgiving at the time as far as fitting. This pattern has a customizable collar and an optional cuff hack as well that I knew I could use to enhance the holiday theming. I went to JoAnn's and bought a couple different fabrics and faux furs and went to town on my first holiday project. I was especially proud of this initial attempt at faux fur sewing because it can be really difficult to deal with and makes a huge mess no matter how careful you are. I love this little jacket and it's the perfect touch of festivity without going overboard and also happens to be a great weight for the weather in Las Vegas for most of December.
This year, we planned to attend the November Dapper Day outing with our daughter at Disneyland. (Due to an accidental double booking of events we ultimately didn't go.) For this trip I knew I wanted holiday themed garments for all of us to get some great Christmas photos: a dress for me and my daughter, and a shirt for my husband. Making this number of garments, especially when full skirted dresses are involved requires a pretty sizable chunk of fabric, so I was on the hunt for a cotton print that spoke to me,l but also wouldn't break the bank. I searched high and low before finding this wonderful red and green ribbon print at Quiltique in Henderson (my favorite fabric store in greater Las Vegas). It reminds me of gift wrapping ribbon and I love that about it. Once I had the fabric, the dress pattern became my next big concern. For this print I wanted something that didn't have any panels that would break up the lines, and I also wanted a full skirt option to really showcase the details of the ribbons. These requirements led me to Charm Patterns's Night and Day Dress (which is my favorite classic bodice) combined with Charm Circle Skirt for all the fullness (petticoat time!). This pattern is so well suited to fabrics that shine on their own and I use it frequently. I feel so classic 1950s in this dress and I doubt I will ever stop using this pattern.
Along with what I hope will become my annual handmade holiday print dress (or skirt--we'll see), this year I decided to go for the Christmas apron I've been wanting to make since Gertie released the Cobbler Dress Pattern in September of 2021. The number of amazing Christmas and holiday Cobbler Dresses that have popped up on Instagram over the last few years have been so inspiring and I have been excited to make my own for a long time. I've been talking for years about having a traditional cookie making day every Christmas for years, but for some reason have just never been able to make it come together. This year is going to be different because now I have an apron and I cannot let the apron down. It worked out well when I gave my daughter the choice of what she wanted for Christmas dinner dessert and she chose cookies. I plan to spend the day in my Cobbler Dress apron, making homemade bread and cookies with my mom and is a tradition I want to add to out growing repertoire. For this apron, I bought a vintage inspired reindeer print from JoAnn's during their holiday fabric closeout in January. Originally, I had enough to make a whole dress, but I decided to use it for this pattern and then gave the rest to my mom for her own apron pattern, so we'll match during our day of baking (holiday extra!). The Cobbler Dress has options for a knee length dress as well as an inserted ruffle. Obviously I went all out and did the ruffle. This pattern is so fun to make and watch come together. It's almost too cute to get dirty with baking. Next year I may make one from holiday fabric scraps. How many Christmas aprons is too many? Surely more than one.
My next big set of projects all center around marathon weekend at Disney World. I'm working on a dress to wear on medal Monday for photos and also a cosplay dress for a Star Wars Disneybounding idea I have been noodling on for most of the year. I will make an entire blog post dedicated to my marathon weekend fashions in the new year. Tomorrow I am heading out for some thrifting and will likely make my next post about this week's adventures. Which topics do you like best, sewing or thrifting?
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