27 dresses

I have a LOT of clothes that I have collected for the purpose of refashioning them.  Some vintage, some ugly (like I was daring myself to make something with it), some I just liked the fabric, etc.  Anyway, the amount of things I have for refashioning is starting to exceed the amount of space I have for storing it.  So I had an idea.  A series of posts where I refashion one dress per week!!!  My sister told me it should be called 27 dresses after the movie even though I don't have 27 dresses yet to sew - more like 21 - but by the time I go through those I'm sure I can find another six dresses.  Even though that seems like it defeats the purpose of clearing out my stash...Anyway,  I'm actually pretty psyched about it. 

I know, I don't post very regularly, but maybe this is just what I need to get myself back into sewing.  And besides, I already have my first dress refashion to show you:

This lovely and super comfortable pair of shorts is a modification of my favorite pattern:

I've used this pattern many times because it's the only pattern that I've really gone in and made it fit really well.  It took some trial and error, but it's really nice to have a basic pattern that you can alter easily.

This is the original dress, a 100% linen, not vintage but certainly pretty dated dress from the depths of my mother's stash (yes, I do get a lot of stuff from my mom who likes to collect more than sew):

Notice the large purple stain.  Basically I avoided the most concentrated spot but didn't worry about it a whole lot - it's pretty subtle around the edges.  You can see where some of it is in the ruffles on the shorts.

And, just to prove that I can have some commitment when I decide to, I have even sewn a second piece of clothing from the remains of the dress:

The back is some crocheted table thing my mom gave me when I told her I was planning on making a shirt like this.  The only problem I had here is that there was not enough of the dress left to cut bias tape for the edging, so I had to use just plain old strips - that is why the curved edges don't lie as smoothly as I would like.  However, I was able to make it wearable by steaming it to death.  The purple is more noticeable here because I was running out of fabric.

So, yeah,  I took pictures of the projects while I was sewing them, so expect to see something like a tutorial soon here!