A Gift a Day 2013: Day Twelve: Houndstooth Dress

I completely scrapped my sewing plans for day twelve to make a houndstooth dress. I saw one online that morning and I remembered my mother-in-law gave me one of her dresses to make over several years ago. It’s a heavy-weight mini-houndstooth fabric.

I have never completed a dress in a day before, but I was making a pretty uncomplicated dress, so I thought I would go for it. Plus, I planned on using the intact hem to cut my sewing time.

It turned out the hem  on my mother-in-law’s dress was not sewn straight, so I ended up cutting the fabric to straighten it, using the houndstooth pattern as a guide, and hemming the dress.

I made sure to match the pattern on the front and back skirt and bodice pieces. It really makes the finished dress look better when your lines line up.

I worked on this dress during naptime, after naptime while the oldest were at the archery range, Ivory was taking a long nap, and Wren and Elsa watched a movie. Then I worked on it some more after they were in bed.

Technically, it’s not completely done, because I discovered I didn’t have any black buttons to go with it. I’ll be ordering some on Black Friday from Wawak.

Houndstooth Dress

Supplies:

fabric

thread

buttons

dress pattern (I used one I already had that came free in a sewing magazine years ago).

Tools:

scissors
sewing machine

Time:

This dress took me about 6 hours.

Cost:

$0 so far, since I repurposed it from a hand-me-down. The buttons will be $0.43, so the total cost of the dress is $0.43.

I’m considering making a red belt to go with it from material from my grandmother and some D-rings that I cut off another item, so that wouldn’t add any cost to the dress if I do that.