Sorry for my long absence, an unexpected internet outage and an expected trip to Vancouver put me off the refashioning bandwagon for a while. But don't worry. I've got a doozy of a refashion to make up for it today!
In Anne of Green Gables, Anne's stern guardian Marilla refuses to make Anne a dress with puffed sleeves (all the rage in the 1860s), saying "There's
enough material in those sleeves alone to make a waist,
I declare there is." Well, I found the dress to give Marilla nightmares.
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| I swear, I could fit inside that. |
Ok, let's address the elephant in the room--those sleeves are horrible. But take another look at that dress.
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| These sleeves beg the question--how would you eat with them?! |
It actually fits me perfectly. I don't exactly count this as a point
for this dress, because all it shows is that this weirdo ruffly kimono-thing is supposed to look exactly like this. I'm not sure why anyone would want that. I was so distressed by those sleeves, that I just hacked them off without thinking any further ahead.
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| Never again, giant sleeves, never again. |
Then, of course, after making such a fuss about how I could fit into those sleeves, I simply had to try.
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| It fits, with room to spare! |
After I finished marvelling at the sleeves, I began trying to decide what to do with the rest of the dress. I didn't like the side ties, but I dithered about how to remove them. I thought about doing the job properly, by unpicking the seams they were sewn into and then restitching the seams, but I didn't have enough pale blue thread to redo the topstitching on the front panel. I decided to just cut them off as close to the seam as I could, and pray for the best (fortunately, I could tell from the unserged seam allowances inside this dress that it wasn't going to fray).
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| two side-ties in pretty fabric removed. |
Unfortunately, I accidentally snipped a little
too close when I was removing the right side tie.
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| Oops! |
Yep, that's a little hole, and before I could go any further with this refashion, I would have to fix it. I was lucky that it was so close to an existing seam, and in a part of the fabric that had a busy bit of pattern--my repairs wouldn't be too obvious. I grabbed my tiny amount of blue thread, and the smallest needle I own.
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| Needle and thread to the rescue! |
I quickly closed up that hole from the back.
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| Doing stitches! |
Now that I'd fixed that problem, it was time to figure out what to do with those sleeves. I started off simply by measuring to make sure they were the same length, and then folding the raw edge under and stitching it down (I had to make do with white thread--not perfect, but it was the best I had). That left me with a really awkwardly gaping sleeve that looked like this:
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| Big, awkward armhole. |
I played around with a few different ways of improving the sleeve opening, and eventually decided that the easiest would be simply to fold over two bits along the top section of the sleeve to make it look like this:
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| Much better fit! |
I pinched the fabric about an inch away from the apex of the sleeve, and folded it towards the top.
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| Fold one! |
Then I did the same on the back half of the sleeve.
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| Fold two! |
I pinned it and stitched along the existing hemline to hide the fact that there were two lines of stitches along that section of the sleeve. Then I fastened the edges of the hemmed part with a tiny stitch and knot.
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| Hidden stitch! |
Those sleeves were finally taken care of! For my final big change, I lopped off a good chunk from the bottom of the skirt.
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| That skirt had a lot of fabric in it! |
I hemmed the bottom raw edge. I
should have hand-stitched it with a whip stitch, which would have made the bottom hem almost invisible and very flowy, but I was short on time. So I went with the quicker option and just stitched a normal hem on my machine. Then I took all my new seams to the ironing board for a quick press.
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| Especially those sleeves! |
Here is the final result!
I confess, I'm still not thrilled about the sleeves. I may revisit this refashion in the future, and see if I can do something better with them. But considering what they started out as, I'm pretty pleased with this transformation! This was one of my biggest refashions to date, so there were bound to be a few hiccups. Tell me about your biggest refashion! Did it turn out the way you wanted it to?
