Another dress for Vegas!!

Ok, remember that blue knit fabric with the white stars all over that I told you about yesterday??

Well, I decided what I wanted to make with it last night and tackled it this morning after our school time!  I decided to try the one hour dress tutorial that I found online.  It took me a little under 1.5 hours to make it!  It was very simple to make and now that I know what I am doing I know I can do it again in an hour or less!

Here is the finished dress in the two belts I thought I would try to use with it.  I couldn't decide what looked best but I am really leaning towards the black belt.

I definitely want to try this pattern again!  But when I do I am going to make some changes.  I followed the tutorial pretty much to the letter this time around but next time I am going to do a few things different.

1.  The tutorial says to make the left shoulder (as you are viewing the front of the dress) side 3 inches in length.  Well I felt this was too short after I finished.  In fact if you look at the picture of the dress on the tutorial page it is obvious that dress has more than a 3 inch length on that left shoulder.  I believe it needs to be the same 6 inch length that you gather the right shoulder side up to.  Thankfully the dress looks ok with kind of a aysmetrical look of the two shoulders being different lengths, but I really think it would look better if they were the same length (more like what they are in th picture on the tutorial).

2. I will not make my neck hole as wide.  This came from my A measurement I had that you make from shoulder to shoulder.  I need to go a couple inches smaller next time and I will be happier with the neckline.

But all in all I am happy with the dress.  It really does have a bit of a different look when worn than it does on the dress form.  I just don't know how to get pictures of myself in the dress to get a good picture to put on here.  I tried and it didn't work...I am a sewer, not a photographer.

Note:  This is definitely a dress that needs a belt to make it look right!  I would never wear this dress without the belt, LOL!  I felt like I was in a moo-moo! LOL!

But the dress is very comfortable!  I love the material and feel I will get a lot of wear out of this dress this spring and summer.  I am ready to go fabric shopping and find some more material to make another one!!

A Forgotten Treasure Found

I was going through my stash of fabric this afternoon (which is several boxes I must admit, LOL) and I can't believe what I found!!  OMG!!

Back before kids, actually right before I found out I was pregnant the first time (with the baby we lost) Daniel and I went with some dear friends of ours on a valentine's getaway to a bed and breakfast.  My friend and I decided that we wanted to make pretty dresses for our valentine's dinner while we were out.  We were planning on finding a nice restaurant to go to.

Well when we got there we got an unexpected snow (we live in TX so really any snow is unexpected).  It was super cold and roads were not very good.  So we decided to just eat somewhere in the little town we were staying in and none of the restaurants they had were nice enough for us to wear our dresses (I guess we could have but we would have been way overdressed and besides, it was really cold!)

So I never got to wear that dress :-(  I found out the next week that I was pregnant, and even though I lost that baby I got pregnant very soon again after that and then had Seth...and then Aaron...and then Alyssa.  You know the story...no time to go out and, besides that, the dress no longer fit!

Anyways - I bored you with that story to get to this one :-)  When I was going through my fabric stash I FOUND THAT DRESS!!  I guess I had put it with my fabrics thinking I would never fit back into it!  Well, as a lot of you know I have lost quite a bit of weight!!  So I decided to try it on today and IT FIT!!!  Actually it was a bit too big :-)  But I did a couple of alterations on the side seams and now it fits really nice :-)

Here is the dress after the alterations (I found that photographing it outside did a better job of showing the true color of the dress!)

 Here is a close-up of the bodice showing the beautiful detail of this embroidered fabric.  I fell in love with the fabric as soon as I saw it.  (we went shopping in the Chinese district of Dallas through the many cool fabric shops to find our fabric).  I didn't get a close up of the bottom of the dress but it is the scalloped edge of the fabric.

 Here is the back!  It's obvious I had not mastered invisible zipper seams at that point - oh well.  At least the zipper is the same color as the dress, LOL!!

So I think I have changed my mind on the dress to wear for the rewards banquet in Las Vegas that I am attending with my hubby.  I think I am going to have to wear this dress instead!  :-)  Don't you agree??

Oh and here are some other fabrics I found today that I want to maybe play with before the Vegas trip.  The blue fabric with stars is a stretchy knit!  I have a couple of ideas of what to do with it, just have to make a decision.  I guess I will be doing some playing with the dress form tomorrow! :-)

I finished my dress redo!!

Remember this post where I mentioned that I was going to refashion an old dress of mine for my upcoming Vegas trip?!?!

Well I finished it!  I had to abandon it for a bit so I could do some Valentine's outfits but I finished it!

Here is the before picture (My husband bought it for me the Christmas we were dating.  My Christmas present that year was the dress, jewelry and tickets to a show!  (yes he was quite romantic and still can be at times today!)  He picked out the dress too!  I loved it and still do but it no longer fits!  :-(  I gained quite a bit of weight since then and even though I have lost most of it, after three kids my body is just a different shape )-:)

The dress also had a jacket (which the sleeves were always tight...I never liked the jacket).

But here is the AFTER picture! Big change, huh?!?  

What I did was measure how long I wanted the dress to be from top to bottom and cut that length off the bottom of the original dress.  I put the cut off portion on my dress form where the cut off portion laid just a bit lower than where I wanted the top of the dress to be and pinned this to the dress form, as seen in the picture below.  (oh and I turned the dress inside out before pinning it to the form so you are seeing the lining showing in the picture)

I then pinned up the fabric to make darts so that the dress would be fitted.  I did two darts in the front and two darts in the back.  I then sewed my darts.  The picture below shows the right side of the fabric with the darts sewn.

I then used the material from the jacket to make a band around the top of the dress.  I used the original straps of the dress for the straps for the new dress, just sewed them back in place.


When I finished that I just felt like the dress was missing something.  So I started digging through my stash to find something to trim it with or give it a pop.  I found some lace and ribbon that I thought would work!


Here is a close up picture on the trim.

Here is one final look of the new dress!  I really think I want to find a cute little spring cardigan and I could wear this to church.  Of course for Vegas I will be dressing it up with accessories.

I would really like to be able to make one more outfit for Vegas but I don't have much time - we leave in 3 weeks!  But there has got to be something I can come up with :-)