Out of my wheelhouse

 Many of my sewing buddies earn their living altering special occasion dresses. It is often difficult work. Special occasion dresses are often made with a much more complicated construction than everyday wear. A skirt might be made up of many, many layers so a job that might seem simple, like shortening a dress by a few inches might be a massive task. I am not even going into the complications of altering a bodice of a special occasion gown. Trust me it is much harder than hemming such a dress.

My husband and I have been invited to the wedding of a young cousin.The dress code for the wedding is formal. I figured no problem, I have a whole wardrobe of long dresses. The bride however indicated that she didn't want her guests wearing black. She wanted a garden party feel.

This was a problem. I have a Moschino wrap dress vaguely similar to this dress but a solid dark blue.

It wasn't really a long dress. I am on the cusp of being an old enough relative to wear whatever I wanted. 

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I were in the country and we happened upon a vintage/consignment store. I wondered if I could find what I needed there. They had a collection of long dresses, prom dresses, mother of the bride dresses, bridesmaid dresses and a few wedding dresses. I saw a few things that were pretty but in terrible colors for me. I found a couple of dresses that were beautiful but alas not my size.

My husband poked through the rack and suggested this dress.

It fit but was several inches too long. I wasn't sure, but my husband commented about how the color reminded him of a garment that I had owned decades ago and how he always liked how I looked in it. The dress cost all of seventeen dollars. We took it home.

My first task was to hem the dress. The dress was made up of the chiffon outer layer and two layers of lining fabric. I realized that I just needed to shorten the front. I used a small Post-it and a piece of chalk as my marking tools. The center front was shortened about two inches and I tapered the cut down to nothing as I got to the back of the dress.

I hemmed the chiffon layer with a maybelle hem. That is a fancy term for an easy peasy hem. You machine stitch a straight stitch where you want the hem to be and cut the excess fabric close to the stitch line. That line of stitching gives you a nice grip so you can roll the hem, enclose the raw edge and stitch again to enclose the raw hem and end up with a beautiful tiny neat hem.

I stumbled onto this technique many years ago when I couldn't figure out another "proper" way to hem something and felt almost ashamed about using this technique until I found an article in a sewing magazine that described this technique and even gave it a fancy name.

I hemmed the lining layers in the simplest way possible and just serged  the shortened lining. A serger is a machine that cuts fabric and then wraps the raw edge in thread. if you look at the inside of your t-shirt it is probably finished just that way.

The dress looked great---but the back bodice is open to the waist. Having a bra strap going across the back of the dress won't do.

There are all sorts of doo-hickies that have been created for exactly this sort of a problem. I purchased one and it almost, but didn't quite work.

I thought that if I added a scarf (you can actually see it sewn into place in the photo above) just above the zipper I could solve the bra-showing problem. I had dyed this silk chiffon and had turned it into a scarf to give as a gift.

My initial thought was to have the scarf just tied on the back of the dress.

But instead....

The scarf will be wrapped from the back, and brought to the front and  either tied or pinned in the front.( I really like how the scarf criss-crosses.)

Here it is tied.

And now here it is pinned with one of  my late mother's brooches.

So with some, but not a huge amount of work and a small  expenditure of money I will be dressed properly at my cousin's wedding.