Saturday 31 August 2013

Wrap Around to Halter Neck...

I used to wear Indian wrap around skirts aplenty when I was a teenager. Growing up in a warm climate, they were perfect with sandals and a singlet. I used to love the patterns and always wore them down to the ground. I've given them away over the years of moving around and traveling, and living in London doesn't really allow for enough warm weather to really indulge myself with them very often but I have been on the look-out to pick up some more second hand.

Joy oh joy, I did end up finding one with the most beautiful colours of vibrant and dark blues, elephants parading around the bottom of the skirt and gorgeous leafy designs all over - unfortunately it only went down as far as my calf. However, I have been searching *forever* and I loved the colour and patterns, so it needed to change in order for me to keep it......

The pattern below isn't too similar to this, but close-ish and in blues and creams (sorry readers, my bad- I have been working on this project on and off for ages and don't have any before photos or photos of skirts even similar.... read on however!)


So, as you will see on the top back of the dress I was pinning bits and pieces together in true hotch-potch fashion.... this was before I had my trusted tailor's dummy!

I started by cutting the elephant trail out and using it as a very wide waist band (it's below the chest and above the hips). 

The elephants were at the very bottom of the skirt, so I used the main bulk of the skirt after they were cut off to fashion the bottom skirt of the dress under the waist band. Having the wide waist band meant I had extra bits of material left to re-fashion a top. As there was not much room for movement or mistake (every last scrap of material was pasted together to cover gaps, etc...!) - this could easily have gone either way and therefore I put a zipper in the back so as to utilise all of the material...

This is the end product....

Patched together!






Looove the colours!


Sorry! I won't cut my head off next time!

This dress will get loads of wear, as a skirt it would have sat in my drawer. As it gets cooler I plan to put some stockings and stocking sleeved shirts on underneath and wear with boots to brighten up the grey days a-coming - it's a lovely jaunt from my usual black!

Thanks for reading!








2 comments:

  1. You've done such a lovely job! So beautiful. My goal this year is to do some refashioning myself. :-)

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  2. Thank you! I lurrrve the colours. Looking forward to seeing some of your refashions :)

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