So, today’s project time felt like it was going to be another fail. It started going badly right away, but I dug in, did some problem solving, and just kept going. It wasn’t until I saw the after photos that I realized that I really LOVE this project. Whew!

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you might remember this dress. My friend, Jenn, gave it to me when I was doing The Thrift Project last October.

It is a lovely dress with velvety flowers, embellished with hand-sewn beads. There were a few problems with the dress – missing beads in a few spots and a seam coming loose – so that made me feel a little better about what I was going to do with this piece. If it had been in absolute pristine condition, it would have been really hard to touch it.

But those tiny little flaws told me it was okay. I measured the width of the front of the dress at several points, made chalk marks, and cut the entire dress open in the front.

For a few minutes, I stared, wondering what exactly I had done. Along the raw edge where I cut the dress, little beads started popping off and rolling around on the floor. I was really unsure if I could actually make it work. And then I took it to the sewing machine to try to hem the raw edges. Turns out beads and sewing machine needles don’t really work well together. I mean, I sort of knew this, but I thought I’d give it a try anyway. The results were disastrous – broken beads, skewed stitches, threads catching everywhere.

So I took a deep breath, took the dress to the floor, and started removing beads. I used my seam ripper to pull the threads for every bead within a half inch of the raw edge. I hand tied all the little threads to keep the remaining beads intact. Then I did a little rolled edge on both sides of the opening. It totally worked.

I still wasn’t sure how it would look. A kimono was my inspiration, but kimonos usually have sleeves. And belts. And someway for them to close. This has none of those.

So maybe it’s more like a vest.

Or a scarf with arm holes.

BB said, “It’s a superhero cape!” BG said, “With sparklies!” Yes, that’s it. It’s my sparkly superhero cape. Now to come up with my superhero name….

UPDATE: Let’s be honest. If I were a superhero, it would totally be this one:

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This post is part of a 31 day series. Find all the posts in this series here.

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