Time Out for a Mundane Dress. No, really!

Here's something I never do on this blog, but I had to share.   I can't help it:  I LOVE T-SHIRT HACKS.   I saw this one on Pinterest:

blog entry + how-to from the Pin  HERE 

And had to have it.   But that's not all I had to have.  I had to have a cute, sassy little black dress; but what I actually had was this:

pose and dress re-do also inspired in part by
The Refashionista! 

Now, before I go any further, let me note that my boyfriend took these pictures, and he's a giant.  I'm five-nine, people, and in these pictures I look like a stumpy little log with hardly any legs.  He's six-two, and taking these shots basically from his face-level.  I look silly. Heehee.

Anyway - how boring is this dress?  It makes my tits look saggy, and while it's comfy, it's just not remotely interesting.  There's no cleavage!  There's no shape! At least I took the short sleeves off of it years ago so it doesn't look out-and-out grandma-y.  But still.  It needed something.  It needed a lot of something.


First it needed to be either longer or shorter, and since I can't add length out of thin air:

I cut off about 7-9" and curved up the side to form a sort-of mans'-shirt slit on both sides at the knee.  Ish. 

And from the piece I cut off, I removed the original hemline, to use as a thin tie belt on the finished dress.

It's kinda awesome!  And my head is all weird!  Tall boyfriend!

The overall shape is much better now, the neckline is waaaay lower, which I love, the length is comfy, I love the tie belt, and...

 There's that cute little slit/curve in the side.  Yay!

"But Laura,"  you ask, "What about that braided neckline?"   

I did the braided neckline.  I cannot get a single picture of it to turn out.  Black fabric - whaddaya want, yanno?   But it looks COOL AS HELL.  You'll, um, just have to trust me.

I will note, mostly for myself, for next time, that the way that I cut the slits  in the fabric around the neckline for the "braid" (see the original tutorial here) made it very difficult to accomplish said braid.  I meant to try it on like a sock or something first to get a feel for it, but I got all gung-ho and just went for it.   I did two things, not "wrong", but that I'll change next time:

1.   The slits I cut were smallish (they look to be about 2.5" in the tutorial, and mine were at most an inch and a half), and too far apart in proportion to their length, which meant that the loops resulting from the slits had to stretch really far, which made them thin and tight and hard to work with, and also really small.

2.   I also graduated the size of the cuts  - smaller in the back and shoulders, gradually widening towards the front of the neckline, for a braid that gets bigger around the front and then tapers off again.  But since the slits were so small and the loops so tight, what I got was a braid about 3/4" in the front and barely as wide as a pencil in the back!

Also, with such a tight, small braid, even though it looks really awesome, it drew the fabric of the dress up a LOT.  You can see it above in the pic from the Pin/tutorial - how the braiding pulls and gathers the fabric?  It's a really lovely effect.  Except that it pulled the straps on my dress up so much that they're quite a bit narrower than they started out, and that's the only thing I'm not happy about.  But I can live with it.

(And yes, I tried un-braiding, thinking I'd just adjust the slits.  No dice: the fabric stretched so far and pulled so tight the first time that undoing it and doing it over would have just broken it in places.  I'll just make the slits bigger next time).

And oh yes, there will be a next time.  And if I can manage a decent pic of that braid, I'll post it.

Ta!


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