The Refashioned Dress

Project: The Refashioned Dress

Goals: to make a dress I can actually wear out of the house

Well, I've finished the dress. The dress which I started last night. After rereading my posts I've discovered that I can be a bit negative about things. I mean, I've had the machine for less than a week and I've done quite a bit with it: the cardi, the skirt mending, the zipper, the board marker ball, and now this dress. The problem is I've become quite frustrated with myself for not being better at what I'm doing. After thinking about it (while wearing the dress at one of its less-finished stages) I've decided I'm going about this all wrong. I need to do small projects, build up my confidence and skill, and then go into doing bigger ones. That said I still felt obliged to finish the dress.

Okay, now that my self-analysis/pep-talk is over I can get to the dress. The plan for this dress was to take this pink number

and couple it with this skirt I bought it at Texas Thrift, which I thought would be cute to cinch with a belt and boom instant strapless dress. The problem was that the elastic at the top of the skirt did a wonderful job of digging into my chest, so it looked odd. I was going to still keep the pink M&S dress as the exterior of the dress but line it with the skirt, then make some straps. As you'll see, the final results were pretty much the opposite (not literally, though; I don't even know what that would look like).

First I'd like to mention that the brand of the skirt was "Phool."

Okay, so I cut the elastic waistband off and then I cut along one of the seams. This is how much fabric I had to work with, aka "tons".

I pinned the dress to where I wanted to sew (the idea was to sew the top panel of the skirt to the top panel of the dress). I was quite pleased with myself here but I should've realized that my careful planning could not and did not take into account my new greatest foe: stretchy fabrics. I HATE THEM.

So what happened next? Well, I did one half of the dress by keeping the pink dress taut, because I figured the elasticity would hold. Well, it doesn't. Also my stitches went all wonky. Here I became annoyed, but I soldiered on. I finished the stitching (because of my obsession with keeping the pink dress taut to try and keep it stretchy I didn't have enough skirt to line the dress) and tried the dress on. Disaster. You know how when you look in your closet and you see something you haven't worn in ages and you're like "why don't I wear that anymore? It's soooo cute" and you put it on and there's always something that makes you go "ohhhhhhhhhh that's right" and you hastily take it off? Yeah, this pink dress was one of those items (as you can see from the before picture). With the lining of the skirt it became even worse. I was pretty close to devastated. I mean, my goodness. Why can't at least one thing I make turn out the way I want it to?

It was at this point that I stopped taking pictures because I got so annoyed with everything that had to do with everything. On a whim I turned the dress inside out and realized, "Hey, wait a second... this doesn't look half bad." The pattern of the skirt hid my horrible stitches and actually looked fairly decent.

The only problem was that it didn't close completely (because of the point above about running out of skirt fabric). So I took the dress off and stitched up the lower part, which came out surprisingly okay.

For the next step I stitched up the top half. The upper "hem" is a little uneven because I haven't sewn it but to be honest I don't have much faith in my sewing abilities right now and I'm terrified to ruin the dress. So, here's the before and after:

I cinch it with a belt, obviously, so in a poetic fashion the skirt has now reached the potential I saw in it earlier this year. I don't hate it at all. I tried to take a picture of the back but this was the best shot I came up with:

My god but I have a lot of hair. The back isn't fantastic so I plan on wearing this dress with a cardigan; I'm fairly certain cardigans were invented for this exact reason.

Here's a picture of the dress on my bed:

Anyway, I'm making a promise to myself to not be so overambitious. My next project will be a Morsbag which I think i can do with little to no fuss from the rest of the fabric of the skirt (I'm putting off the apron for now).