Mad Men Inspired Dress

I was inspired by Peggy's black dress with white stripes, even though I know she's not the style icon of the show. I liked the stripe down the front, which ironically is the part I left out of mine.

I was lucky enough to find this black quadruple extra large men's polo shirt at the thrift store, and it was a tall to boot!  I picked a gray print that I think of as businessy/officey for the trim.

And here is the final product.  I made a few changes - I decided I liked the sleeves longer, and had to add a piece to the bottom to make the dress long enough, so I omitted the stripe down the front because I thought it would be too much.  Do you agree?

Here are a couple intermediate pictures, since I don't blog.  The first step was to remove the collar and rip out the bottom hem.  Then I turned it inside out, pinned the sides, and basted them.  You can see the yellow stitching there.  I used another skirt that was sort of a 3/4 circle skirt to chalk in where the waistline would be, so I could use that to measure down to mark the hemline.  The bottom edge needed to be cut on a curve so that it would hang evenly all around. I wanted the skirt to be as full as possible, so I deliberately let the side chalk lines run off the edge of the shirt and filled in the gaps with triangle-shaped pieces I cut off the sides.  Then I just made new narrow sleeves out of the original ones and added all the trim. 

The picture above shows the triangles sewn onto the side edge of the skirt. It ended being pretty full. (I have to work on the kitchen floor so that explains all the dog hair.)  Anyway, it's super-comfortable and I'm looking forward to wearing it to work.  Thanks for looking!