Hurricane Irene Dress

We started seeing rain from hurricane Irene Friday around noon. By Friday at 5pm I was home with water and batteries, and bored.... so I decided to sew. There was a good chance of losing power, but I figured I would sew until the power went out if it did. Project? A new dress from an old dress.

Here's what I started with:

Functional, but boring...
I have had this dress since high school I think. I was really into this style of sun dress at the time, but now I'm bored with it.


I used a store bought dress that I liked the fit of as a template. See the bar of shaped hotel soap in the upper right? thats my "marking pen." It works on any dark fabric, washes out (cause its soap!) and best of all, was free!

Instead of reshaping the original bodice, I kept the bottom of the dress and cut off the neck line and arm holes.

I gave the new dress a V-neck with a gather.

A couple lessons learned:
1: It is hard to hem a curve (arm holes and back of neck)
2: It is hard to hem a V (I added the gather as a way to camoflauge mistakes at the bottom of the V, but I think its a technique I will reuse...)
I'm still learning, and I'm starting to understand the use of bias tape...

We never actually lost power, and so I sewed until 2 am when I finished the dress. Therefore the project was started and finished during the hurricane. :)

This morning, the rain was gone, and by noon the sun was out. I went to survey the damage in my hurricane dress.

The wind shredded the tarp we use to keep the rain/snow/sun off our bikes.

I also found some down tree branches.

Overall my area suffered little damage. Lots of people around town lost power, but we had very little flooding. Other areas got a lot more damage than us.

-Erin
SewingScientist