I’ve made a weird patched dress using twelve old Tshirts of my boys’. I know it’s bizarre and crazy and probably a little bit ugly but I totally love it!
I’m constantly pinning patchwork-y and randomly asymmetric things. I’m actually very inspired by and crave to wear stuff like this A LOT in reality, even though I also make and wear a lot of plain things. I think I have a very non-cohesive brain, wardrobe-wise. It plods along all plain and quiet and unobtrusive for a while, “fitting in” with the norm *yawn* and then will suddenly have the urge to zoom off into arty, thrown-together-land. Making something kinda weird and wild like this makes me feel quite exhilarated; sorta free and unconstrained and satisfied and happy. I don’t think I act upon this often enough. Clearly, I need a little more such craziness in my life!
Anyway, the new dress. I was inspired by this dress credited to Jurgen Lehl.
I used one of my oldies, Vogue 7795 with some adjustments; namely with the front bodice tucks and back bodice darts removed and the waterfall skirt drape transformed into an asymmetric box pleat. Also I made the back bodice and back skirt as one piece each, with the CB seam removed from both. In my memory this is a very drop waisted design, so I also shortened the bodice pieces by about 4cm.
I’ve made this pattern up a couple of times before; both many years ago, my first version in white swiss dotted voile is pictured here looking tres touristy with a gelato and at the Fontana di Trevi in Rome, and my second version was pink, although I can’t find any pictures of that one.
When you’re making a large scale, randomly patchworked design like this one, I’ve found it’s a good idea to draw out the adjusted pieces full scale and lay them out as a guide for the patchworking. That way, you can see how the design is looking on the scale of the dress as the piecing progresses.
I selected twelve Tshirts, all old, some very old, cast-offs from my boys. This is one of the things I love the most about it actually, in that I am so familiar with each and every one of these shirts, having watched my boys run around playing in them a zillion times, also of course I’ve washed them all, hung them on the line, folded them and tucked them away into their dressers about a zillion times each also.
A sentimental dress then, in a way 🙂
There’s also one “new” fabric, harvested from a recent Absolute Fail… *sad face* IG’ed here.
I cut all the fabric into varied width strips and then just got creative.
In a super random design like this one it’s good to install some order to the thing somewhere, and in this case I stuck to the same order in the colour arrangement. I finished the neckline and armscyes as simply as possible with strips of black Tshirt, stitched on right sides together, then folded to the inside and topstitched.
And lastly, I recently received an email from Charlotte regarding the sew solidarity challenge run by the charity TRAID. Essentially it’s this: to commemorate the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse you select an old, not new! mass-produced garment, possibly from Bangladesh although I didn’t restrict my options country-of-origin-wise, re-fashion it fit for a new life and then you’re supposed to wear it on 24th April. Last year I joined in the same-aimed Fashion Revolution movement by wearing my self-made clothes inside out. Theoretically this year I could do either of these commemorative activities… option 1, wear this dress as per the Sew Solidarity challenge; option 2, like last year wear something else I’ve made inside out as per the Fashion revolution challenge; OR option 3, combine the two challenges and wear this dress inside out. The only problem with option 3 is that I’m pretty sure my insides might be kinda too ugly for me to get away with this in my very conservative suburb! The insides are a gridlock of overlocked seams, and because I used some fabric pieces wrong side out, the prints are then on the inside of the dress; so it’s a bit of an unholy mess in there. But I guess the option is there, should I choose to look irredeemably ridiculous.
Details:
Dress; modified Vogue 7795, made from old Tshirts
Shoes; Zomp, from Zomp shoe boutique
