Stonehill Mountain dress (revisited)

Well, it is Holy Week--what can I say?  It has been a difficult Lent, and this week continues apace. Piglet and Ponchik just came down with another virus, and Birdie might be getting it too.  I'm trying to take it in stride.  At least I've gotten a lot of sewing done this past week--keeps my mind occupied.

 So let's talk about sewing stuff instead, mkay?

Remember the Stonehill Mountain dress?  I was really proud of the dress in theory, because it was my first time to really fiddle with detailing on my Frankenpattern, and try something stylistically new.  In practice, however, I hardly wore it.  The tabs on the collar were difficult to dress around--I wear these dresses with cardigans in cooler weather, and it was hard to find one that looked right with the tab details.  The fit of the dress seemed off to me, and I was uncomfortable every time I tried to wear it. I was nearly ready to donate the dress, when I thought perhaps I could save it with a quick fix.

I decided the tabs and buttons and belt buckle had to go.  I had attached the tabs to the outside of the inner seams and then folded them over to the outside of the garment, so it was an easy thing to take my seam ripper to them and pull them off, along with the decorative buttons.  I put the buttons and buckle back into my bin to save for a future project and resisted the urge to sew on a different set of buttons (although I'm not ruling out adding a row of black buttons down the front, just to keep it more or less neutral).

I'm quite happy with the result--this dress is now the plainest one I've made, but it is a nice blank canvas too.  I have three different leather belts that look nice with it, plus I intend to put a dark blue or black buckle on the original belt, so I'll have some options to take this in different styling ways.  

The plain neckline gives me more cardigan and jewelry options, and I realized that what I thought was a poorly fitted dress was actually an ill-fitting belt.  I wore the dress with a long sleeve tshirt under it a few times this winter, and that worked quite well also.  I intend to give myself an extra centimeter or two when I reattach the belt buckle, which I think will fix that problem too.

I wore this outfit to the Annunciation liturgy on Tuesday, and I think I'm pretty happy with it now.  I'm a bit bloated at the moment, so it is a bit snug around the middle, but not uncomfortably so.  I guess it is good to remember that not everything needs embellishment or extra detail--sometimes a plain vanilla dress is just the thing.

Details:

Stonehill Mountain dress: me-made (Frankenpattern, with patch pockets), fabric from Joann's

Belt: target (old)

Shoes: dankso via ebay

Felt heart brooch: Wacky Tuna Vintage (etsy)

Cardigan: JCrew

Earrings: gift from hubby long ago