Red shirts and a red dress

The other day my husband and I saw something beautiful. 

We were waiting for a bus in Washington Heights near the George Washington Bridge. On the corner of 181st Street and Broadway there was a man who had built a castle for himself out of garbage next to an overflowing garbage can. 

Then I noticed two men wearing red George Washington Bridge Business Improvement District (BID) shirts interacting with the man in the garbage encampment. 

They spoke to him gently and one of the men shoveled the garbage mountain into a large trash bin on wheels. They bantered with him and checked to see which part of the garbage mountain could be bagged up and taken away.

At one point one of the workers handed the man a folded bill. A few minutes later, the man selected two small bags from the mountain of garbage and walked away. 

I was struck at how the BID workers exactly struck the balance between respecting the humanity of the garbage-castle-man and the right of the people in the neighborhood to NOT live with a garbage castle on their corner. I loved how their gentle and persuasive manner allowed the man to walk away without an angry confrontation. 

While the last of the cleanup went on I thanked one of the red shirted BID workers for the gentle yet persuasive way they had worked with the man. He gave me a fist bump.

And now, a new topic.

I needed a new summer dress. I wanted something that was cool enough to wear on a swelteringly hot day and also didn't need to be ironed. Fabric Mart supplied me with  the perfect solution. They were selling tubular cotton knits for two or three bucks a yard. For those of you who are not sewing geeks like me...

Commercial knitting machines are essentially big versions of  the toy below. I grew up calling them knitting knobbies.

Here is a slightly more complex version of the same thing.

Most knit fabric is made on a larger, more mechanized version of these simple knitting machine.

So I had a couple of yards of 50 inch wide red cotton knit. (No, the color makes no difference at all.)

 The fabric is 50 inches wide. My shoulders are not 50 inches wide. I will show you what I did with paper diagrams because I didn't take photos of the process. Forgive me.

I folded the tube of red cotton into quarters. I took a dress that fits and folded it in half and lay it on top of the fold.  The cotton knit had very little stretch. The dress I was using as my pattern is pretty stretchy.

There are people who can figure out a mathematical formula to determine how much larger my red cotton dress needed to be. I am not one of those people. What I can do is guesstimate. So I shifted the stretchy dress that I was using as my pattern away from the fold and cut out the bodice.

I was feeling very lazy so I just cut the bodice out until the hipline.

I decided to have the width of the dress below the high hip just be the full width of the fabric.

I cut out the dress and sewed up the seams. It needed darts because it was too baggy and looked really unflattering. This is what the dress looks like inside out. I think that the actual dress is easier to understand than the paper dress cutouts.

This is what the dress looks like on my body.

The belt is one I have owned since the 1980s. 

I liked the challenge of making the dress in the simplest way possible with as little sewing and cutting as possible. It works. I don't have to iron it and it will keep me cool on the hottest and muggiest of days.

This isn't a fancy dress. It just a utilitarian one that will be useful for a couple of summers. Not bad for the price of a subway ride.