Don't Pinch Me

Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone! I don't know what today will hold for all of you, but my hometown will be a festival of green. To celebrate the day St. Patrick did something important back on some important historical date (It's 4 am where I live, and I'm not going to google it.), I pulled this lovely kelly green muumuu out of my "to-do" dress stash.

Maybe I should google "lovely."

I started by removing the sleeves and the pockets. Then I switched it around so the back would be the new front. I did this because a) I liked the look of a rounded neckline, and b) there were coffee stains on the old front that, while they didn't make the dress a total no-go (How can you pass up a funky retro muumuu for less than $1? I mean, really?) they were a little unsightly. The dress was too long, but I didn't want to lose the floral print at the bottom, so I removed the main portion of the dress from the yoke and cut off 3 1/2 inches. Then I removed 1/2 an inch from under the arms to give myself some room to move.

 My seam ripper and I became quite close while working on this dress.

After I'd removed the excess length, I pinned the "dress" part of the dress to the yoke (I repeat, it's 4 am where I live, and I'm getting kind of loopy.) to make sure everything laid the way it should. It turned out that I needed to remove some fabric from the back to give myself enough arm room, as you can see by the 2 inch flap of fabric hanging off the side of the left image. Once that was figured out, I gathered the front and back sections using a basting stitch, pinned them to the front and back of the yoke, and sewed them back on.

Pin twice, cut once.

Next came the fluttery sleeves. The sleeves weren't part of the original design, but after reattaching the everything to the yoke and trying the dress on - as opposed to seeing it on the dress form - I didn't like the awkward triangles of skin that showed between the yoke and the dress. (I hope that made sense.) I used the 3 1/2 inch scraps that I removed from the "dress" part earlier to remedy the problem. First, I hand stitched a 1/4 inch hems to the longer side. Then I gathered the shorter side and reattached the sleeve to the rest of the dress. After adding the sleeves, I finished off the arms with bias tape.

Goodbye weird triangles! (Now it's 4:25 am. All hope of sanity is lost.)

 Finally the dress was complete! I'll be wearing this with my tan rope belt and some tan wedge sandals. The weatherman says it'll be in the low 40's tomorrow, but I've decided it's springtime!

Kiss me, I'm Irish-American!

(And Scottish, Dutch, English, French, German... My ancestors came from all over.)

Now it's time for a quick nap before the day begins. I hope you all enjoy your Sunday and all the adventures it holds!

- Elizabeth
   aka The Hungry Octopus