The Print from the Past

 

This weeks project started with a trip to my favorite antique store. I can use the word "favorite" very confidently because, out of all the antique stores in my home town (and there are a lot of them), none can compare to what's inside this one. Why? Because this particular store has an entire floor dedicated to vintage clothing.

I could spend a whole day pilfering through the racks of dresses. The hat collection alone could entertain me for at least an hour.

Hats! I absolutely love old hats.

Because I've made plenty of trips to this little gem of a store, I know exactly where to look for clearance clothing. The clearance corner is one of my favorite sections of the room; it's just full of dresses that are begging to be re-fashioned. It wasn't long before I found this 1970's ankle-length print dress on the rack.

After inspecting the dress and its small imperfections (all used dresses have them, after all) I decided it was well worth the $5 price tag. When I got to the register, I was told that everything upstairs was marked down. I got to take this dress home for about $4.45.

I immediately fell in love with this print; it's so dramatic and artsy!

When I got home, it was time to lovingly take the dress apart. I think that taking dresses apart is my favorite part of re-fashioning; people usually go through great pains to keep their dresses neat and unharmed... It's a nice change to attack the seams with scissors and seam-rippers.

First thing's first: the dress was much too long. I love long dresses, don't get me wrong, but with the big bold print, I felt that less was more. I looked up some tutorials on the best way to shorten a dress evenly, and decided that none of them were for me. I measured the front with a piece of ribbon that I'd cut to the length I wanted, and then proceeded to cut the dress without a pattern or a method.

I wanted the back of the dress to be a bit longer than the front.

Next I pinned the bottom to make the new hemline. It's been a while since I sewed a dress, but I did remember that, after pinning, it's important to press the hem. Unfortunately, since I've moved in the last year, I've lost track of a lot of things... Including the iron. I like to think of myself as pretty resourceful, though; my hair straightener made a fine substitute.

 After sewing the hem, it was time to make a serious decision... What to do with the sleeves? As fun as they were, they didn't quite fit the style I was going for. So, off they went!

Pinning the black ribbon around the arm hole.

Taking the sleeves off was pretty time-consuming, but I was determined to keep the arm holes neat and intact. Unfortunately there wasn't much fabric to fold inside the arm holes once the sleeves were gone. After stitching around them the best that I could, I decided to hide the inner raw edges by hand-sewing some black ribbon.




Finally, it was time to make a few small repairs. The zipper in the back of the dress worked great, but it was starting to come apart from the top of the dress:

After some pinning and persuasion, I managed to make the back a little neater. At long last, the dress was complete! I can't wait to show off this print!