A couple of refashions

So I was planning on doing an outfit post today. But it was raining all day (a very gloomy Monday)...and then I ran out after work and went for a bit of a distance in the rain after some free patterns that had gotten posted on Craigslist. The girl had advertised over a hundred sewing patterns, women's and girls' dresses, though she hadn't gone through them. So I rushed over in the pouring rain to snag a bag of patterns, hoping for some great things! I had visions in my head of vintage patterns, beautiful dresses, that one gorgeous pattern that would happen to be just my size. But then it turned out to be about 30 patterns, some without envelopes and almost entirely young girl or doll clothes, like these:


There were two adult patterns...a shirt and shorts set and this dress pattern:


Oh well. They'll be useful when I have small girls in...twelve-fifteen years or so, right? (Actually, anybody currently have small girls who want to wear 90's clothing? Interested in me sending you a couple of these?) But in any case...I got back soaking wet and the clothes had to be taken off. So no outfit pictures for today.

Instead, a dress refashion. I had grabbed a dress from the dollar-a-pound seeing this awesome fabric. Red and white and ginko leaves!


Unfortunately, the dress turned out to look like this when I got home and tried it on:


Hmm. Not exactly to my taste. In particular the sleeves were huge and shapeless, so I wanted to take them off. The armhole was really large once the giant baggy sleeves were gone, so I stitched a new seam up the sides to take them in (requiring multiple tries due to my inability to guesstimate what size circle my arm will fit in). I also changed the shaping of the side to make it narrower near the armholes and increase down to the extra ruffle of fabric. Some vintage seam binding around the new armholes, a belt to give it a bit more shape, and here we are:


I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out. It's not a particularly sophisticated refashion...doesn't change most of the dress construction, but it still changes it enough that I'll definitely wear it when it gets warm again. (Like this weekend? When it's going to be 70 degrees, maybe?)



I also did a quick refashion over the weekend of this plastic-ish bangle bracelet. It started out the ugly beige, which I tried to redo (a few weeks ago) with some gold nail polish, but gave up halfway through when that still looked pretty messy:

So I got a piece of printed silky trim from my stash and hot-glued it onto the bracelet, wrapping it around and around and gluing at each wrap. This also serves the helpful purpose of making it slightly smaller and thus more likely to stay on my arm.



Hope everyone is having a good Monday!