I retrieved a red stretch-velvet dress from my parents’ garage sale pile. Such promise!
But look at that grody symmetry and those heinous sagging shoulders. This dress needed some help.
A probably-unreasonable amount of time later….
Yes! Savory.
What I did:
Installed a strip of gathered tulle into each sleeve cap to puff it up (sewn to the armhole seam allowance facing into the sleeve).
Added large shoulder pads VERY loosely based on Sew Retro Rose’s shoulder-pad-making tutorial. I tacked them at the shoulder seam on each end.
Undid my mother’s hacky size adjustment and replaced it with my own hackier size adjustment.
Re-hemmed it to a slant, losing 7+ inches on one side and keeping it as long as possible on the other.
Added ruffles down one side of the neckline and across to the opposite waist, chosen to point at the top of the hem rather than be semi-parallel to it.
The ruffles don’t hold up to inspection if you look too closely at them – I was running out of time before the night I wanted to wear the dress, so I had to be hacky again. I took three wide strips of crepe-backed satin, folded them lengthwise so the satin was out, pressed, folded the ends in and topstitched, and zig-zagged twice to hold and bind the edge. Then I gathered each about 3/8″ from the edge and secured it with more stitching. I stacked them together starting with the topmost ruffle, seam allowance to the right, then the bottom ruffle (which was slightly wider), seam allowance to the left and barely overlapping the top ruffle, and finally the middle ruffle, seam allowance to the left and mostly overlapping the top ruffle. After they were all together and sewn to the dress, shoulder seam to side seam, I folded the top ruffle over and secured it with hand-stitching.
My original design inspiration was the television series Dynasty, with help from my Bangles albums. I had to buy the makeup for this because I don’t think I’ve worn blush in twenty years. Special thanks to my sister for inspiring the slant hem with her aesthetic advice to try to look like “an unstable stack of geometric shapes” and to my mother for suggesting the ruffles.
