Think Pink (Stripes)

Week one of Refashion Runway has flown by! My very talented competitors and I submitted our before and after photos on Friday, and now it's your turn to vote for your favorites!

For those of you not familiar with Refashion Runway, it is an online sewing competition hosted by one of my favorite bloggers, The Renegade Seamstress. Each week the eight competitors (and anyone who wants to sew along with us, hint hint) complete a different sewing challenge - stripes, denim, a copy cat look, and a summer dress.

When I heard that this week's challenge was stripes, I knew just which dress I was pulling out of my "ugly" stash. It was a pink and white striped seersucker sack of a dress with an awkward zipper and lovely lattice detail around the neck.

Holy house dress, Batman!

After removing the giant pockets and the zipper, I sewed up the front where the zipper had been and cut the dress in half.

Maybe not exactly in half...

I fit the top of the dress to my dress form, gathering the fabric under the bust and adding two pleats/darts/tucks (whichever...) in the back. I also undid one of the sides to allow for a zipper and used the giant pockets to make the band around the waist. Then, I added three pleats in the back of the skirt and two in the front of the skirt before sewing the skirt to the rest of the dress.

Pleats and such...

Once the dress was mostly together, I added cap sleeves using scraps of leftover fabric. (My sleeve adding process was embarrassingly time consuming, but at least I learned what not to do next time.) Then I added a little gather/tuck at the top of the bust to make it fit a little better, and sewed in the zipper.

More pleats and tucks and such...

I was done in the nick of time! I snapped some "after" shots and sent them in to The Renegade Seamstress. Now all you have to do is vote for your favorite striped refashion! Please check out what everyone has been up to. We've got some really talented ladies over there!

Refashion Runway week 1: stripes

Next week's challenge is denim. Won't you join us and sew along?

 - Elizabeth

   aka The Hungry Octopus