Watercolor Dress Re-Size!

Hi all!

I tackled a project this weekend that I wanted to share with you all here.

At Goodwill a couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were browsing the clothes and we came across this monstrosity:

It was a 16 Wide (I'm a 12) and it was so brightly colored and patterned and so old-fashioned looking that we both laughed and laughed and passed it right by.

But...I kept looking back at it...and looking back...and looking back, until finally, to my friend's great amusement, I blurted "I NEED THAT DRESS" and ran back and grabbed it before anybody else saw the potential I saw.

I figured, you know what? I can make this dress look awesome, adorable, and even sexy!

It was pretty hideous, but it had some neat details. I loved, loved, loved the pattern, the more I looked at it. And it had this cool pleating on the sleeves that struck me as really neat:

So I cut the sleeves a little shorter (leaving the pleating of course) so they were now more like cap-sleeves. I also took in the sides of the dress by around 2 inches, and brought up the bottom hem by two or three inches (just so it was above the knee and not right below it, which tends to look pretty frumpy on my stumpy legs).

The result was even more fabulous than I could have imagined!

It even looks good from the back...

I'm pretty proud of this recon! It's not a dress I would ever have picked out to wear, but reconstructing clothing is giving me a much broader interest in colors and patterns. I love it!! I can even wear it to work (with a blazer):

Here's the before and after right next to each other:

I love it! See my blog post about it for more details.

Happy Monday everybody!

XOXO