Throwback Thursday

So a while ago I was thinking about my grandma and I thought how cool would it be to make a dress like she wore in these pictures I have seen of her. I picked a picture out that I loved and got to work!



So this is my grandma! The funny part about this picture is that we have a shed next to our house that looks like the door in this picture with a walkway behind it and everything! However, our shed door opened the wrong way, so we had to take a kind of reverse picture. I decided on using a vintage pattern that I had made before because it looked the closest to the dress she was wearing.



I've made this once before and liked it a lot, so I decided to give it another go. The fabric I got at an auction. It was actually in a bag with some light green fabric and 2 green zippers and 2 rolls of green thread. That kind of made me sad. Was this a grandma about to make 2 dresses for her grandkids? It made me feel better to think that I was making a tribute dress to my own grandma with this beautiful fabric.

I hit a couple of snags on the way, however. The upper back was too big for some reason and the waist was too small. So I did a little cutting and pasting so-to-speak and also took a little length off the bottom. I wanted it to be as close add possible to the original.

I used iron on bias tape for the first time ever on the neckline and it was pretty cool. I might be hooked! I used an invisible zipper and I even hid the waist hem under some bias tape, which I was pretty damn proud of.


Hidden waist seam, bitches!

Once I was done tweaking, I needed some shoes to match. That... was... the... worst. I scoured the internet and found nothing that I thought was close enough. I ended up finding a pair of retro looking shoes at our local help center for $2 and even though they weren't the right color (I guess), they still looked closer than anything else I had found.

Then we waited... and waited. Flash forward to 2017 and the day had come to actually take the picture. This dress had been sitting for almost 2 years! I got a break last year when my mom gave me some flowers that I wanted to plant by the shed to look closer to the picture of my grandma. This year they bloomed in full force, so I picked a day without rain, which was a challenge in itself. It seems like its been raining here every day for a month! Anywho, I enlisted my husband to be the camera man so I wouldn't have to run to the tripod and hit the delayed timer and run back and pose all before it took the shot. He took some from the correct angle, but again the door wasn't right, so we took some more with the door open more like she had it. I think they turned out pretty good.






<3


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