dragonlady7

via https://ift.tt/2mHYwPO

that I talked about in this post [https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/187717557964/saturday]

I finally took a moment to get a photo of it. It is not a great photo but it is in focus. As an aside, wow I never look at full body shots of myself, that is uh not how I think I look. That’s okay, let’s not discuss my feelings. (Part of it is that I had my phone propped against a fire extinguisher and thought it might tip over at any instant. There’s a semi-hilarious outtake I’m not going to bother posting where just that happened. Imagine it: me looking dismayed and blurry and sideways in the distance, mostly ceiling though.)

So this is the dress I was talking about before that I made out of two or three old t-shirts and the bottom of a torn skirt someone handed up to me. (The waistband of that skirt is part of another almost-finished upcycled dress that I’ll take pictures of at some point!) It’s reasonably closely based on the Natalie Chanin t-shirt-corset pattern from her Alabama Stitch Book, which has to go back to the library today whoops, though I had to trace the pattern and size it up somewhat inexpertly, so it kind of. Well, it’s close, we’ll just say. Closer than just “inspired by”, but not actually really the pattern itself.

Anyway photo behind the cut.

[image description: the author, a large blond white woman with her hair pulled back tighter than she thought it was wow it looks like i’m wearing a skullcap, looking disapprovingly at the camera with her hands on her hips in a bad imitation of a coy pose, wearing a dress made of several curving panels of black and dark gray t-shirt material sewn together with hot pink seams, with a skirt that’s black and has horizontal bands of ribbon across it and is also kind of transparent. incidentally also she is wearing a necklace that is two triceratops skulls staring at one another in profile, and leggings that are slashed to reveal fishnet underneath.]

The t-shirt corset is longer, in the pattern, and extends down over the hips, and I was like, no. Also she wants you to hand-sew it with the seams on the outside, and I decided that since i own a serger and this was the trial run of the pattern, I would instead put embroidery thread in my upper looper and serge the thing, so I did. Maybe I’ll handsew a future version once I’m sure I’ve got the pattern adjusted properly. 

The skirt pattern she uses is a four-gore A-line skirt, but this is an old broomstick tiered skirt from the 90s with a costume petticoat under it. No, the leggings are not upcycled, I bought them like that because Torrid had them on sale and my previous attempt to make my own had not come up with any kind of usable product. 

This is not a *perfect* dress pattern yet; I think I like a more defined waistband or a more substantial fabric. But it’s a good trial run and I’ll have fun wearing it around. Needs pockets though, not sure how to add them to so insubstantial a skirt– maybe, attach them to the shirt, and then down into the skirt but the idea is the weight of what’s in them will mostly pull on the bodice? How to engineer? Must consider.