I woke up on Saturday morning, realised I didn’t have anything to wear to a friend’s birthday celebration that afternoon, so decided to sort through my stash to see what I could find. I came up with…
…this bedsheet that I bought from our local op-shop megastore (Savers) for $3…
$3 double sheet
…a zipper that came from the stash of bits and pieces that my Gran gave me a month or so ago, as well as this pattern from 1966…
McCall's 8624
…and finished up with this little number…
I was originally going to make view A with the sleeves, but after I did a bit of resizing of the bodice, the sleeves weren’t cooperating and time was ticking on. I decided to just hem the armscythe with white bias binding tape I luckily had lying around, and opted to fore-go the neck facing and trimmed the neck with bias binding as well. Ahhh…how I love bias binding: the lazy seamsresses friend!
Bias binding...how I love thee
Although my finished product looks nothing like the pattern envelope, I’m quite happy with how it turned out: a drunk guy we met at a bar was astonished that I’d made my own dress and from a bedsheet too…he demanded to see the inside seams of the dress to prove that it was homemade, and kept telling random people at the bar that I was a dress-making genius!
The dress by itself looks rather like a sack on me, so I styled it with a belt and it looks much better:
A few firsts on this dress too: the first garment I’ve made on my new whiz-bang machine; first time I’ve inserted a zipper before the dress was actually put together (genius idea – love it!); and a tricky way to ensure the zipper goes in exactly where you want it. I’ll definitely be using it in the future.
Fabric: $3
Notions: free
Time to make: 4 hours (including the all-important coffee breaks)
A new dress for less than $3, and a morning of work!
