Salvedged Skirt

I love Halloween more than any other holiday of the year. I was really excited this year to dress up as a "Mad Housewife" like the image on one of my favorite wines. I picked out a cute 50's vintage pattern from McCall's and some inexpensive dark purple cotton. I borrowed Mom's purls and made those cute lace gloves from this post.

And it all went downhill from there.

It ended up not really mattering because I had a migraine on Halloween and didn't dress up or go out, but man was my dress just one problem after another.

First Jo-Ann's shorted me a yard of fabric. We all know that cotton shrinks, which is why it is important to pre-wash garment fabric, but even the store admitted that I wouldn't have lost more than a yard to shrinkage, but they also wouldn't do anything about it because I had already washed the fabric. I was a bit miffed to say the least.

So I bought two more yards of fabric to be able to lay out the remaining pieces. The new piece wasn't from the same dye lot, so even though I doubt anyone else would have noticed I was very aware that the front bodice and sleeves were a different shade than the back bodice and skirt. Grrrr.

So I get to the sewing the dress together part and it has a side zipper so I did a French seam on all but the left side seam, where I did a clean seam. Or at least that's what I was planning on doing. Somewhere I got turned around and ended up with a clean seam on the left side of my bodice and a French seam of the left side of my skirt, so I couldn't install the zipper on either side without undoing at least one French seam.

But that turned out not to matter because the dress was so big that I didn't even need the zipper to get it on and off.

So I put in the back of my sewing chair in time out while I tried to figure out how to salvage it.

At the end of the day I decided that I wasn't over fond of the neckline either, so I chopped off the entire bodice. There was just to much fabric used to not try and get something out of it.

I think the skirt came out pretty darn cute. To solve the issue of it being too big, and the zipper being on the wrong side I cut up the center of the skirt and added a button band. By folding over 1/4" and then another inch on each side I got rid of the 2.5" extra inches, it didn't pull the side seams to noticeably far forward and I think the buttons are really pretty. Then I just added a waistband, hemmed it and called it good.

Here is a close up on the buttons. I added 12 of them, going all the way down the front of the skirt.

I wore the skirt for thanksgiving dinner at my in-laws house and I felt very pretty! So all is well that ends well, even if it was sort of a pain in the patootie.