When I found this dress by Forever 21 at one of my fave thrift shops, I was reminded that I’m an entire decade older than their target demographic. Yikes.

Other than being shoddily constructed by an evil fast fashion giant (end of rant), this dress had a couple of other issues as well. It was about a size too big for me, it was really faded (hard to see in the pic), and it had a damaged zipper.

I decided to take care of that fading first. I grabbed a box of black dye…

…then took the dress and started folding it into a pitcher, sprinkling a bit of the dye powder into the folds as I went.


Once the dress was completely wadded into the pitcher, I filled it with hot water.

When it was filled, it looked like this:

I left the dress submerged for about 2 hours, then gave it a thorough rinse in my washing machine.
Okay…so the faded color was taken care of, but it still needed a bit of fitting.


After a quick press, my dress was ready!
Well…almost ready.
I still hadn’t fixed that zipper, and was running late to meet a friend for dinner. :/
So I did what any self-respecting refashionista would do and just used a pair of pliers to get zipped up!
I promise to go back and replace it later.
My friend managed to take a few really blurry photos of the “after”. 😉

But I snapped a couple of backups at home. No worries. 😉

It continues to be a good bit chilly here in SC, so I immersed myself in a massive cardigan!

Hope you guys have a great weekend!
Cheers!