A dress, a dress, my kingdom for a dress!

Well.  It's been a minute, huh?  I took a slightly impromtu trip with my kids to visit my parents last week, and am now catching up on everything.  It was a good visit overall, and good to get out of the city for a while.  But I can tell that the last months have taken a huge toll on me.  I went to Walmart with my mom to pick up a few groceries and the sight of bursting shelves and food abundance about did me in.  Call it post-Soviet-grocery-store-syndrome.

I had it when I visited the States for a brief visit while living in Russia, but this time was different and harder, somehow.  Because the difference is this: in Russia it might be hard to find some specific things, or to find them consistently, hence the авоська or perhaps-bags, but you can always find something in the stores.  The shelves weren't bare of staples like bread and flour and canned goods, at least not in the early naughts.  The late 90s was a bit more precarious, though, it must be said.  You just get used to the one brand of toothpaste, soap, tomato sauce, or whatever, and when presented with row upon row of options in the States, it proved overwhelming in a different way than the past three months of privation and stress about provisioning a household of six people, five of whom eat a lot. 

I think there was a little bit of feeling like I had been gypped in the quarantine.  If you feel like the whole country is suffering privation together, like it is for the common good somehow, you can put your head down and get on with things, but to suddenly understand that the privation is really only in specific places in the country, because of who knows what, that there is grocery abundance elsewhere, it is harder to sort that in your mind.  

But enough about that.  You're here for other things today, I'm sure, so I will give you a dress.  Perhaps you remember the first two iterations?  I wore them both a ton (although somehow never got a good photo of the second one), and was a bit sad to put the last one in the fabric bin to cut down for the girls because the style no longer suited.  I still love this fabric, and was kind of missing it in my closet, so I decided to try and refashion the dress into something that suited me better now.

I have a ready-to-wear dress that I thrifted last fall (see above) that I like the shape of quite a bit, and decided to model my refashion on that.  My only complaint about the RTW dress is that it is sleeveless, but I tend to wear it with something else over it anyway, so that is okay.  But for summer, I needed some kind of shoulder coverage for skincare reasons.  #burnsinthemoonlight  

Since the original S1080 pattern had cut-on sleeves that I had redrafted, I left those alone, but shortened them about 1/2" or so, since I didn't care for the volume or length.  I took off the kangaroo pocket, unpicked the tucks and back elastic, and shortened the dress considerably (almost 4 inches!).  With the fabric from the hem (I had no leftovers in my bin from making either version of this dress), I made a casing and waist tie. 

The main feature of the RTW dress I like is the casing and waist tie, and I used that dress as a guide for placement.  I'm pretty pleased with the outcome!  I won't say it feels exactly like me, but sometimes you just need a dress.

I do wish I had pockets, and I could make inseam pockets with plain fabric with the edge out of the little bit of matching fabric I have left.  But that is a project for another day and more mental energy.  For now, this is a good, easy-wear summer dress.  I made two more and will share those shortly.