Dilatory

I purchased a dress online from ebay (because I’ve been told that clothing on ebay is an outrageous good deal), but got sent the wrong dress. And now they won’t send me a replacement.This thing was floor length and just….all kinds of frump.

What else to do but cut it up and make it wearable?

I did this one in the spirit of a look from the super over-hyped Pattern Magic which I thought was intensely clever looking.

I’m still trying to figure out a good way to tie the front, a reproducible way that is. The original intended way isn’t working too well for the flimsy cotton so I kind of just twisted and tied until it came eventually together.

Complicated. Or not?

This skirt is one of those things that lags and agonizes for so long that you grow to stop liking it despite its general coolness. I started this back in oh…June. If you remember from here, it was my mother’s pants, then an upside-down dress, and now this.

Sometimes I have these intense pack rat tendencies and just can’t let things go…

I don’t know why I just couldn’t throw it out. It looks pretty hopeless to me. The whole deconstruction/reconstruction process was of kind of a drag since the novelty of working with the garment had vanished as this was the second time it came through the ordeal.

The fabric is a kind of strange elastic, but stiff twill weave. Tossing such an intriguing fabric would have be like throwing raisins out of raisin bran (I mean, who does that?)

While seemingly wearable, I don’t know if this one’s actually going to make it into the wardrobe….

I am positively enthralled by this absurd weather we’re having. I usually dislike talking about the weather, but this fall has just been fantastic with these little warm ups! 70 degrees F in November? In Chicago?!? What?

So of course I had to find something cute to wear today—I had Beijing-hip on the mind, something upbeat and different.

A few weeks ago, I bought this size L DKNY men’s cardigan at a yard sale around the block. My friend liked it, but didn’t have any cash on him, so I supplied the finances. And of course just as nothing stays the same, his opinion of it didn’t. Initially, it occurred to me that I could just wear it as is, but then I glanced in the mirror and the baggy slouchy thing could only be termed aptly as a HOT MESS, meaning I had to chop it all up and rearrange.

My only complaint is that the shoulders are a little too wide for me still, but that’s mostly just because I was too lazy to cut the sleeves off and reattach them. Who wants to do that when there’s a quantum mechanics problem set waiting to be done?

After these photos, it seems apparent that I need to upgrade my $99/2 pair glasses with non-glare lenses…..

yes.

Necklace from forever 21. They have such a huge selection of jewelry, but one thing that always irks me about f21 is that you rarely are able to find the stuff on the website in the stores and visa versa—you can’t online shop then go to the store expecting to find anything.

Well, since I’m neither an olden day bourgeois nor modern day new england prepster, white is for whenever the hell I want it.

I’ve been super swamped lately with sitting at my desk in the lab and then going home and sitting at the desk in my room all day that I haven’t laid a single self manicured finger on my sewing machine. Woeful days indeed. However, I am advancing in the world! Honors thesis YES.

Even if I’m doing little more than sitting all day, it is in these last bits of sunny warmth that I try to break out as many light skirts as possible before the heinous temperature declares wool a must.

This little skirt I made from one of my roommate’s discarded shirts. It was a lovely eyelet shirt but had this nasty blue ink stain on back. I assured her that bleach would do her a solid, but alas, some people don’t believe the things I say as much as I do. So I just made it into a skirt. The waist band was a bit difficult to manage since the empire line was curve to expand for the bust, not tapered for a waist. But several slanted stitches did the trick.

I love the cat! It’s such a furball.

Anyway, the shirt bottom was a bit on the scandalous side for a skirt unless you’re into that sort of risque fashion. So I took a ratty old swissdot shirt of mine which also had an eyelet trim and used it as a drop lining.

It’s so easy to rescue clothing. Don’t let pieces with really nice fabric go to waste because of some small imperfection.

I’m really fascinated with remaking my clothes right now since I haven’t really been able to find any inspiring fabrics recently. A lot of what is sitting in the textile shops is quilting or home decor fabric and when made into clothing, they almost always look like shoddy home sewn costumes.

So here’s the process of the earlier posted dress. I purchased this original skirt when I was in middle school (I liked the plaid, but the length was somewhat unflattering). The silver metal studs on the waist were also kind of a deal breaker…

But being a tiered peasant skirt from the early 2000’s, there was a TON of fabric in it, more and more each tier down. I did like the textured ribbon on the waist, but the studs absolutely had to go. So I reorganized the pieces a little and ended up with this short skirt and a big bundle of brown and blue.

Could have just left it here, but my closet is certainly not lacking in separates. So a dress it will be! However, matching plaid at seams always gives me a headache. I’m pretty terrible at it and always end up with a tiny bit of mismatch. So to save myself this fate, I opted to go for a sort of creative top patterning. I crossed two pieces to make a spiderweb pattern and then sewed in the little sides for a bodice. This gave some pleated room so bust measurement and adjustments were unnecessary.

The pattern did match a bit with itself, but that I assure you was purely incidental. After cutting out some bias strips to bind the edges, the dress was pretty much done.

It was sort of agonizing to sew the X together…but everything else went by pretty fast. Took me maybe 2 hours to finish. But this was on my mother’s incredible industrial beast of a machine.

Some fun plaid pattern play with an old item from the cavernous back of my closet. Jewelry is Uyghur (Turkish ethnic minority in western China) that my uncle brought back when he visited Xinjiang.

It has gotten so cold so quickly that I’m confined to taking photos indoors. The sharp change in temperature only tells of chillier days to come. It is just SO cold!

Living in such a winter-centric city has made the majority of my closet fall/winter clothes so I’m fairly welcoming to the notion of getting more utility out of what’s been hanging untouched for a while, especially jackets. Oh I have sooo many…maybe some much needed closet cleaning is in order.

More on the creating process later.

This is my….16th? 17th? first day of school. Oh lord I have been and will be in school forever…btdubbs I got a new hair cut!

I made this wool dress from a huge (size 14) pencil skirt I purchased some months earlier. This one’s been an ongoing project for some time. I cut off the bottom 3/4 of the skirt and kept it as it, lining and all. The princess seamed top was pieced together from the remaining 1/4 of the top and the pockets inside it. Waistband was ironed out and reused as is.

This is was quite an ambitious redesign since there wasn’t much fabric to use. In the end, I only had a 1’ by 9’ piece left after everything (not counting little post-it sized trimmings. Just goes to show you, you can make a dress out of anything!

Necklace is brown lace with pearls sewn it. In hindsight, it would have been much easier to just buy the one at Rue21 for $7 instead of making my own. But alas. Other jewelry is jank stuff I picked up from the streets of China.

And it gets so dark so early these days! I barely had enough time to take some pictures after I got home before the sun set…

Everybody and their excitable cousin loves New Dress A Day and I am no different. But its lack of high profile recognition is something that does not surprise me. I would have expected a blog this well thought out and faithfully updated to be picked up by the Today Show, or Tyra Banks, or a magazine like Nylon. Yet looking at the “after” pictures of the garments involved, it became quite clear why Marisa’s charming personality and unique idea weren’t enough to carry her all the way to some big recognition.

I don’t mean this in a mean way, but something that I noticed right away back when I first read this blog was that a great deal of the redesigned garments had this…unfinished and unrefined look about them. They didn’t look like real clothes. Some had safety pins in them, others had unfinished seams and closures.

These pieces didn’t have any permanence. Sure a lot of them looked cute and were creatively altered, but few of them felt like real additions to a wardrobe. They were more like one-day wear fast fashion. That’s why I think the blog failed on some levels to deliver its principle and why it hasn’t caught the attention of popular media.

Are you a devout fan? Did I offend?

An almost apron like button-up dress. I took the cuffs from the pink shirt and made it into ruffled cap sleeves, which gives it sort of a frilly apron look. Not sure if I count this as a success….

Created from the riff raff I gushed about earlier.

In the making:

On a joyous separate note, I’ve finally gotten over my lack of a decent camera and have started using photoshop to hide the inability of my 4-year-old point and shoot.

It’s my new love, linen. Dress made from the llama looking skirt I posted earlier. It cost me $1 and 2hrs.

Pretty easy to make from a skirt. I took out the elastic from the skirt waist and cut off 21’ all around except a few inches for the front (for some odd reason I wanted the front to be continuous, maybe because I was too lazy to match stripes). Made some horizontal darts for the chest area and then attached the smaller back piece with a pleated skirt portion.

To cinch up the waist, I used a scrap piece of cotton to make an elastic sheath which serves to cover up the fuzzies from the raw edges too.

I must add, it’s very fun to wear!