This is the most special refashion I've ever done. This dress once belonged to my mom, Penny. As a child, my mom always wore dresses. She was a good Christian woman and we were always going to church, so she had tons of dresses and skirts. When I was young (7 or 8), she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. In my teens, the disease got bad and she was confined to a wheelchair. Once I became an adult, she had to be put in a nursing home where she lived until she passed away in 2008. When she died, she only had two dresses. Which is what makes this dress so special.
Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of my mom wearing this dress. But here are some of my favorite pictures of my mom...
My sister and I decided we would each take a dress and refashion them for us to wear. There was a pink dress and a blue one. After months of my sister and I being indecisive about which one of us was gonna take which dress, we finally came to a decision yesterday and I went to work on the refashion.
*For the record, we weren't arguing over who would get which dress...It's like we were afraid we would take the dress the other one wanted. Yeah, we're like that. lol
I was lucky this dress pretty much fit me already, so there wasn't a whole lot of work involved to make it work for me.
(However, there was alot of pressure on me not to mess up! And I mess up frequently, so this was nerve racking!)
Here is what I did to rework this dress:
1) I took off the sleeves, then sewed the raw edges of the armholes under.
2) I shortened the dress ALOT. Then sewed the hem.
3) From leftover fabric from the bottom of the dress, I made a belt. I did this by cutting a long wide strip of fabric and sewing it together inside out. I then turned the fabric strip right side out and sewed up the ends.
I absolutely LOVE the end result! I think mom would be proud. =)
***If you have some time, swing by my zibbet shop and take a look around!***
http://www.zibbet.com/TheRufflyBuffalo
Thanks! =D
I see this post is almost a year old - but first, I LOVE your blog! I'm getting into re-fashioning myself :)
ReplyDeleteSecond - this post made me cry. I'm 34 and my mother is 63 however she was just diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer...which thankfully it was caught in time, but still terrifies me to think of what can happen...I don't know you but I love that pic of your mom and your daughter for you because we have yet to have children of our own (ifertility - we're doing IVF) and I can only hope and pray that we have a child before anything happens to my mother. It's actually her sewing machine that was passed down to me and so I'm finally learning to use it. :)
Thank you for sharing your story with me. I'm happy that your mom's cancer was caught early. I will keep you and her in my prayers. <3 That is wonderful that you are learning to sew with your mom's sewing machine! Thanks for reading my blog! =)
DeleteThat is a very very smart dress indeed. You have a flair for refashioning. You seem to know exactly what to change to suit you. I learnt the basics from my mother, and use her old and old fashioned machine till date.
ReplyDeletesadhana