New Dress A Day: A Skill I Do Not Have

More than a year ago, I became fascinated by a blog called New Dress A Day. This was being written by a girl who had made it her goal to take an ugly thrift store dress (for $1 or less) and turn it into something fabulous. It was mesmerizing (look at some of the posts and you'll understand). I wanted some of those dresses for myself, and moreover, I was SURE that I could do it myself. I had thrift stores, I had a sewing machine. What more did I need?

Well, it would turn out, a little thing called skill. I bought a dress that seemed to have potential and went at it.

The length of my hair in this photo should give you a pretty good idea how long it took me to go from start to... well, let's call it finish.

First thing I did was remove the sleeves. This made an instantaneous and amazing change.

If I was wise, I would have just chopped a bunch off to shorten it and called it a day. But oh no, I just HAD to have the scalloped bottom. So, I removed the bodice from the skirt to raise the skirt and chopped off a bunch of the extra fabric.

Then I resewed the skirt to the bodice, and things were looking pretty good. Except that the under layer was crooked. Hmm.

I had to take the bodice off the bottom again and redid the whole underpart.

Success! And the most adorable success ever. If only, if only, I could wear this somewhere where I could be guaranteed to be standing in front of a wall the entire time. Because...

Darn. 

I am not going to trouble you with further pictures of my attempts to correct this problem (thus further mutilating the original layer until it is essentially unsalvageable), but suffice it to say that it is now so small that I can only JUST get into it and while the back is actually sewn together, it has a giant bump under the butt that makes me NOT want to hear the jokes my husband would make about it.

So the dress went back into a bag, and if anybody really wants it to try to fix my horrible, horrible blunders (I swear they got worse after that last picture... much worse...), let me know and it's all yours. It could have been so beautiful. But, when you can get things like this for $3.50, why do I really need to go through the exhaustion of hunkering down over a sewing machine (or the stress of ruining something with so much potential?) 

I think I'll stick with things I actually have talent for. Speaking of which... tomorrow is my final Wednesday of the summer. Fingers crossed!