Happy 4th of July!

Happy Thursday all and, more importantly, happy Independence Day!!! This is by no means a political blog or anything like that - but damn do I love this country, our rights to even have a blog that I can say this on, and the military men and women that fight for those rights.

In saying all that, I have to preface this project with this: this was done earlier in the week and I had totally forgot about this "red white and blue" thing. Hopefully, that will be coming and I can show you pictures of a fantastic outfit fit for 4th of July festivities to be celebrated Saturday.

Also - the before picture is a straight up photo fail. I did not realize a stack of projects was covering the bottom corner of the screen, I should have probably put some effort into makeup (or at least thrown contacts in) and the face is atrocious. But... so be it. Here's the beauty I was working with:

This had a gorgeous circle skirt and the waist elastic was in pretty new shape. The downfalls was the in-your-face pattern (is that newsprint?!), the high neckline and the less-than-fantabulous elastic in the arms. Someone with a small waist and unfortunately large arms previously owned this dress, I think. 

First task at hand was to take out the shoulder pads. Not sure if these half-moons even considered themselves shoulder pads or just wannabe's, but they were outed nonetheless.

Next, since the dress fit pretty well in the sides thanks to the waist elastic, I took off a few inches of length from the circle skirt to bring it roaring into the 21st century.

Next, of course, the arms had to go.


... just kidding! I know that is what is expected so I definitely kept the arms. I cut off the stretched out and deformed arm elastic and chopped off a few more inches for good measure. Considering it has been super humid and in the high 80's in here (I know it doesn't sound hot to, say, Iraq or California, but add the humidity we've been having and it feels high 1000's and sweat happens in -1 seconds) short sleeves were a must.

The next thing that I did, that unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of, was open up the neckline. The neck was wayyy up there and it was screaming for a way out. I found the middle and cut down about 4 inches, then folded over the edges, sewed it down and cut off the excess. The final result I'm pretty in love with and it, despite not being white, red or blue for the holiday, is super comfy and a smash hit in the Thompson household.

Also, I'm not going to brag or anything, and I certainly didn't see this coming until I was feeding my Pintrest addition, but I pinned this dress a few days ago and didn't realize until I saw a picture of my project but I totally remade this dress:

which can be found at this site for $168. Alternatively, I made mine for a whopping $3.50. Boom.

 

Hope everyone is enjoying the festivities, and to those outside of the US on this date... feel free to consider yourself American on this day and have yourself a cook out and blow shit up. We kinda do the same thing on St. Patrick's Day.