Makes me feel like I'm rolling around in a bed of flowers
A few months ago, I picked up yet another amazing dress from Value Village. It needed a little work... despite being a perfect fit otherwise, I couldn't zip it up past my ribcage, a problem that I seem to have all too often with older dresses. Nevertheless, I was undeterred. The bright watercolour pattern was bridging on obscene (in a good way), the length was perfect, and the shape was adorable. I had to add it to my collection. However, while I was in school it was forced to sit in my closet and wait.
How to close that up?
Since then, it has undergone numerous transformations, none of which are particularly exciting because they mostly just involve a reworking of the back zipper area. Originally, there was a zipper that went from the bum to the top of the dress, but that clearly wasn't working so first things first, I took that out. My initial idea was to replace it with a lace-up back, using a pale pink ribbon to tie it all together. The idea held a lot of promise, but unfortunately, after way too much work to sew in all the loopholes, I realized that it was just too long an area to lace. Getting in and out would be a nightmare and the tight bottom parts just looked messy.
So after undoing all my hard work there, I made my first right move and got a shorter zipper to cover the area that I wasn't having any trouble zipping up to begin with. Then I had the fantastic and easy idea of just sewing in a couple bands of elastic above the zipper, as pictured, leaving what I perceived to be plenty of stretch room for getting the dress on and off.
Solution?
Nope.
Getting the dress on was easy enough, and it looked pretty good. However, I soon realized that getting it off was not going to go quite as smoothly. In fact, it proved impossible and I had to grumble back to my seam ripper again and cut myself out. So much for that idea.
So much for that.
At this point I had spent way too much time on what should have been a relatively simple makeover, so I went back to the drawing board, angrily stitched on some loopholes and went for a zipper/lace-up combo, which was thankfully, FINALLY, effective! At least for a short period of use.
It could be improved but it was in wearing condition, which was good enough as I had decided to wear it for my pageant themed birthday party! Which was an absolutely amazing time. Much love to all who came out!
Cheers!
*_*
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