Hey Everybody! I know, I’ve been absent for about a week now, but you know I’ll always come back to you, right?
I was just feeling like I hadn’t been spending enough time with my friends, so I took a little break to relax. Everybody needs a breather every now and again, right?
What follows is probably THE MOST frustrating refashion I’ve ever done, and a testament to my lunkwilled stubbornness.
It all began with this nautical number right here:
Had I found this a few weeks ago, it would have probably ended up being my dress for the Yacht Rock soiree I attended awhile back.
Sadly, I had no use for this nautical look. :/
A close inspection of those star buttons revealed they were in pretty bad shape, so I removed them.
I also got rid of those giant shoulder pads!
As most of you know, I HATE wearing white (It only serves to bring out my ghastly pallor).
So, I tossed this frock into a nice, hot dye bath!
This is where things started to go awry.
This dress is a ramie/rayon blend. Ramie takes dye. Rayon does not. This means that I knew I would only be getting a subtle blue out of this.
Except…
The darker bits are where a stain was that I didn’t notice in my initial examination of this dress. They were super-noticeable and only on that one spot.
I almost gave up right then.
Before scrapping this refashion altogether, I decided to try to dab on a bit of bleach to the spots…
Yeah…that didn’t quite work out.
I was so close to giving up.
I took the bottles of dye I had used and splattered random bits of dye on the dress and left it in my sink overnight.
When I rinsed it out, I discovered that the splotchy dye hadn’t set at all. I was back to square one.
I filled a pitcher with a bleach-water solution and wadded the dress up inside it.
I figured that if I made the rest of the dress uneven, those splotches might look intentional.
Guess what? It worked! HUZZAH!
I was still far from done.
I found some cool buttons in my giant stash, and sewed three onto my dress. I decided to just leave off the functionless buttons on the left side.
I grabbed my seam ripper and got to work removing the sleeves and collar.
Next, I unpicked the front and back seams of the crotch.
All this unpicking left me with some rapidly-fraying raw edges to deal with.
I put what was about to be my new dress inside-out on my dress form and pinned the unpicked legs into a skirt.
I stitched this down and cut off the extra fabric.
I pinned down the raw edges of the collar and arm holes…
…and stitched those down too.
I took in each side to make my frock perfectly fitted, like ya do.
When I tried on my new dress to see how it was shaping up, I was alarmed to see a little something extra I hadn’t planned for…
It was awful. After all that work on this extremely frustrating refashion, I had somehow ended up with a suspiciously bulgy-crotched frock that there was NO WAY I was going out in public in!
I almost gave up.
But then I took the bulgy area, folded it under and pinned in from behind to do a weird faux 2 piece thing that I think really looks quite awesome.
And now, BEHOLD! The most annoying refashion I’ve ever executed! 🙂
I actually love this.
I wore my fancy new frock to SC Pride, where I made some new friends!
I had a blast with my friends, who all thought my dress was pretty swell.
Dan and I even enjoyed brandy and cigars on a patio!
Such a lovely day! And I’m SO very very happy I didn’t give up!
Do you find yourself stuck on a refashion like this every now and again? How do you get over the “I really don’t want to do this anymore” hump?
Cheers!
