Liberty/Wedding
This is my favorite one. It’s made of a liberty of london button down (that was originally long sleeved) and the bottom of the 80’s wedding dress.
my cat strategically placed herself in this photo.
note matching scrunchie.
Heavy Shoulders
These sleeves are from an 80’s dress that looked like a bag on me when I tried it on. I put them on this American Apparel dress and this is what happened. I had to make a band in the back to help the dress stay up because the sleeves were a bit heavy. I actually wore this dress in real life, it was a blast.
80’s wedding
This is probably unfinished, I think I’d like to dye it. I was going to wear it for graduation but then I thought the slip part would be too short but now I am very sad and wished I had just gotten over that and worn this dress. Oh well, it’s too late now and I don’t have much of a need for a white dress, so I think this one will have to change color. Could be an interesting experience….maybe blue.
It started with an 80’s wedding dress with the most amazing sleeves ever, too bad I cut them off.
Then I took away parts, and this is what happened:
flower details:
A finished Project
There are actually quite a few pieces that are now done, but this one just happens to be the one that has been photographed so far. So here it is:
This is a mishmosh of a regular cashmere sweater and various pieces of silk and lace from a wedding dress. I thought that this project would be the easiest one to tackle, and I don’t know if I’ve ever been more wrong about something. It was incredibly difficult to complete and gave me all sortsa problems. The design had to change a bit for this to work out. For example instead of having silk pieces in the front, I wanted to have lace, but for some reason this did not work out quite the way I wanted it to.
What I have learned this week:
Fabric is a very very very very very very difficult medium to work with. You will rarely get the results you expected, and know you will be disappointed more often than not
Sometimes it’s just better to hand sew it than do it with the machine. Sometimes it’s good to have that control
The Wedding dress I bought is going to be a lot more difficult to work with than I had originally intended.
The gold and black sparkly dress I bought is going to be a lot more difficult to work with than I had originally intended.
The tan sweater I bought is going to be a lot more difficult to work with than I had originally intended.
I need more clothes.
First Project Complete
This piece is now finished! The lace is from the hem of a skirt I bought awhile back and have never worn. So I figured I wouldn’t be too upset if I cut it up. Here it is in original form:
It was a real beauty. Thankfully I only used the bottom lace so the skirt is still in tact.
For this dress now jumper I cut off the sleeves, shortened the skirt and turned them into “pants”. Except their not pants at all, but it’s not a dress/skirt either.
I didn’t realize how big this dress was until I turned it into the jumper and tried it on for the first time and realized how big it was. I doesn’t really fit me but I’m not too upset about that.
There were no major glitches in making this really. I had to redo one of the hems and the skirt turning into pant part was a little difficult but it didn’t take long to get it right.
It’s a little tight in the butt but that just can’t be helped. it doesn’t look that bad.
Urban Renewal
Urban Renewal is this pretty awesome company based in Philadelphia. They basically buy tons of vintage clothing and then make new clothes out of old clothes. Sort of the same thing as my project, except they mass produce instead of only making one piece. Even so, every single piece is unique as they are all made from different pieces of clothing. They just have the same concept/design. For example they bought thousands of vintage levi jeans, cut them into shorts, and then sorted through their ‘scrap’ bin in sear of floral fabrics, made patches out of the fabric, and then put them on the shorts. Voila! Thousands of shorts with the same design concept, but at the same time are all unique.
This piece, made of overalls and floral fabric, I believe is rather creative.
The only downside of Urban Renewal is(I think) that you can only purchase their clothes in urban outfitters or uo’s website, so if you’re buying online, you don’t really know what your piece will look like until you receive it in the mail. Apparently not many people are thrilled with this.
First Day
Today was my first day working on my project. This dress which I believe is from the 80’s judging by the enormous shoulder pads. I could be wrong about that though, I’ll have to check. It’s made of a beautiful silk like fabric and has theses amazing enormous pockets you could probably fit a book in. There are some pretty epic pit stains as well as a rather large sweat stain on the back, which create an interesting challenge because I don’t really want them to be visible so I’ll have to come up with a way to hide them. The plan is to take off the sleeves (which I started doing today) and turn the skirt into shorts or pants so it turns into a jumper. I’m not sure yet if I’ll keep it long or short. I will also add lace detailing which is probably how I’ll end up hiding those pit stains.
