A Little Goes a Long Way

Happy Sunday! It's back to football season, so I'm enjoying my new Sunday schedule of sewing and writing up my blog while watching football and noshing on food that's not good for me. I shouldn't make it a habit, but... I'd like to :)

A chill is in the air and summer is certainly winding down. According to the weatherman this Tuesday and Wednesday are going to be in the high 80's so since Mother Nature decided to go out with a summery bang, I figured it wasn't so bad to do just one more summer dress.

I started out with this:

This certainly wasn't the worst project I've picked up, and as I'm sure you can tell from my title that I really didn't do all that much for a nice update. I like that I don't always have to do a drastic overhaul to make things new and wearable again. I like when I can just do a few tweaks to make it my own and still keep the idea of the original designer. It makes me feel like they wouldn't be horribly mad at me for screwing up their design too badly.

There was certainly something that had to go, and it was this collar.

I'm a huge fan of lace, which is what drew me to this project in the first place. However, extraneous, itchy, tall lace around my neck that creates a mock-turtleneck is not in the cards for me... ever.

Seam ripping out the collar panel was a quick and easy job.

Next, I brought my attention to the lace details on the chest. As mentioned, I'm a fan of lace. I'm also a fan of ruffles (in small amounts). Lace ruffles? That's just too much. Luckily, the two lace ruffles that went down either side of the chest was added on as an afterthought by the designer, and were easily removed without messing up the rest of the lace on the bodice.

All in all, this was all that was removed.

Then I turned my attention onto the skirt. My first thought was to make it a high-low hem, so I put the two side seams together and put down my ruler to see how drastic of an angle I wanted.

Obviously, my ruler is more than lacking for this task.

Besides having a pretty useless ruler, I was very unsure about this high-low. I love the trend and think it looks good.... on other people. On me? I'm too big of a wuss to find out. Plus I'm a sucker for a circle skirt and this was a perfect one.

So I just decided to bring up the hem an inch or so because it hit me in a weird spot right below my knee. As I plan on wearing this dress to work, I didn't want to go to short with it, but still wanted to keep it flattering.

 

This is where I cheated just a little big time. The original hem was just about one inch, so I used it as my guide to roll it up and pin it down. This way, no measuring was needed and the bottom hem looked nice and neat. All it needs after I wash it is a nice ironing to make sure it stays put.

All in all, not much was done to this dress but I think the small tweaks was a vast improvement on the overall look. This just goes to show that you don't have to be a master of sewing (or really, know anything about it) to make a dress your own and tweak it to be flattering for you. Just a cut here, rip there, and a few pin stabs (it happens!) and you've got yourself a classy dress that you can now say " Thanks! I made it" (and whisper "sort of") when people say "Hey I love that dress!"

 

Here's a close up of the nice, clean lace-turtleneck-free neckline.

Note to self: Let's look more presentable in the next project, k?

As always, comments are welcome and e-mails to thriftysew@gmail.com always make me smile. Enjoy your football, or whatever else you choose to do on this gorgeous Sunday!