The Back-on-the-Bandwagon Dress

Here's a much belated refashion, though my absence has not been for lack of trying!  You see, I've had to deal with two failed refashions over the last month.  First there was this:

Just what is the purpose of this?

My intention with this dress was to simply take it in along the sides and shorten it, and turn the sleeves into cap sleeves.  It wasn't supposed to be difficult, but then I discovered that the liner in this dress was in the final stages of decrepitude, and it suddenly no longer seemed worth the effort to repair it.

Then there was this dress:

Rather summery for March.

This was supposed to be my St. Patrick's Day outfit--in fact, I wasn't intending to make any changes to this dress at all until I noticed that it was covered in stains.  I scrubbed it with stain remover, but to no avail.  In a last-ditch effort to make this dress wearable, I tried appliqueing some patches over the stains, but frankly, it just looked stupid.

So that brings us to today's refashion, which is admittedly not all that interesting, but at least resulted in an improved product rather than full scale destruction and frustration.

Here's the dress:

I lack the boobage to fill out this dress

This is a 100% polyester old-ladyish dress with some very charming detail at the neckline.  Here's a close-up:

Pretty!! 

All this dress needed was a bit of slimming around the bust area.  I put it inside-out on Gruella and pinned the sides to take in the top half of the dress.

Just a teeny bit

Then I ran it under my machine, tried it on again, was happy with the fit, and trimmed off the excess:

Zipping down the pinned line!

Snippity snip!

Here's the new fit:

Do you notice a difference?

Ok, so maybe there isn't much of a difference to notice, here, but at least I finished a refashion, ok?  I dressed it up with my polka-dot tights to give this rather staid dress a bit of fun, and added a blazer to keep my shoulders warm.

The end result!

This was a difficult refashion not because it was tricky sewing, but because I had to get over my disappointment and frustration at my earlier failures to pull this one together.  Now that I've managed a success, I feel much better moving forward!