From Size 14 to 24 in under 3hrs!

No, I didn’t force feed models cake.  Athough…not a bad idea…

 

It’s been one long weekend.  I did a lot of sewing and went to see Mom.  I know.  That totally didn’t sound busy at all, but it was emotionally draining.  I suspect I’ll get into that before the end of the week, but let’s start with the easy stuff.

On Friday afternoon, Paladin and I left the house and stopped by the library (we picked up Red Dwarf…can you believe he’d never seen it?) and the Goodwill.  Somebody please remind me not to go to Goodwill in the future!  Some of them are good, but ours is sort of a ripoff.  For what I spend on a used child’s shirt there, I can buy a brand new one at Walmart!  That’s stupid.  Anyhoo, the real reason I went there was to forage for material. 

I have these jeans that I bought never anticipating that I’d fall in love with them.  They were $12 on clearance, but a little too long.  Smart person that I am, I cut them off and they ended up just a smidge on the Urkel side.    As a result, my Solid Gold dancer pants (ummm…did I mention that they have gold lame on the ass pockets and the brightest brass buttons I’ve ever seen?) fit like a dream but they were too high-water for me to wear in public.  That was fine for a long time because I wasn’t sure I could pull off having a gold lame ass.  Then the comfort won me over.  Suddenly, I deeply regretted having to relegate them to days when I knew the public at large wouldn’t see them.    While making my first wedding dress (Sunday morning I made a second wedding dress…I’ll post it later this week), I kept running into some really cool stuff online and in the stores.  It goes by at least two different names: altered couture and indie fashion.  Basically, it’s people taking apart old clothes and making them into new clothes with a little extra style.  On one site I saw a pair of jeans turned into a long skirt.  It was one of those things you remember people doing way back when, but forgot about.  I thought, “Why not do that to my Solid Gold dancer jeans?”  It’s become pretty impossible to find decent fabric in our area which means you either forage or you break down and drive to Lake Charles or Alexandria.  I wasn’t up for the drive, and figured foraging was the way to go.  Enter this Goodwill $7 coat:

It’s oh so very Twilight-esque.  Any girly vampire could vamp in it with its plum lace and plum and metallic gold tweed.  Only one problem.  It’s a size 14.  Grrr…  I hate tearing up something so beautiful, but for $7, how could I go wrong?  I decided to go altered couture on its butt!  At first, I was still going to make my Solid Gold dancer jeans into a skirt, and then I thought I might not wear a skirt all that much.  So I did this instead:

 

I left the bottom of the jacket raw because the tweed will fray nicely once I throw it in the washer and beat it up a bit.  But, I think the lace on the pockets has to go.  I wasn’t sure about it.  So, I used a very loose stitch, and removing them should be no problem.  I think the lame will just have to speak for itself, and…