New Life

I'm back!  I had a wonderful break with my family, although I wasn't able to complete as many personal projects as I had hoped due to a stomach bug that worked it's way through everyone in the family.  But, as usual, problems lead to creativity.

The problem I most recently needed to solve was what to wear New Year's Eve for a dinner out with my husband.  It was December 30th, and I didn't have enough time to make the dress I really wanted to make.  So I looked through my closet and found this dress:

I hate this dress.  I bought it in a hurry for a formal wedding about 12 years ago and only wore it once.  I've tried to sell it, because it is a good quality dress, but I've never had any takers.  But it does have some nice dart detail and the fabric is good so it seemed worth saving:

So I decided to see what I could do with it.

One of my Christmas presents was a book called Little Green Dresses, which is all about repurposing clothing from your own wardrobe or from things that you might find in a thrift store.  I didn't use any of the patterns/projects from the book, but I did look to it for inspiration.  And I decided I would cut a big chunk off the dress and use the extra material to create some sort of ruffle/bottom.

This part was a lot of fun - snip! snip!

I tinkered with the slant of the bottom and decided to do pleats instead of ruffles along the hem.

And, voila!  A new dress and all it cost me was some thread and about 3 hours of time!