text: A little holiday insanity – sew adagio
  On December 25, 2010 October 14, 2015 By BeckyIn sewing
  I went thrift shopping with a friend on Monday night, and found this dress. I just kept going back to it, leaving, going back to it, and finally decided to try it on. I'm surprised I liked it, because I'm not really a lace person, but something about the all-over olive lace just really spoke to me. Plus it fit me perfectly, so I ended up getting it, though I knew it would need a bit of tweaking. (I think Jane thought I was kind of nuts for getting it, though she also said I looked like a dryad, so I'm going to take that as a compliment.)
  So I decided yesterday that this dress would actually be great for Christmas Eve–there's a candlelight service at my church that I'm on the music team for every year, so I'd be right up front and needed to dress nicely. So here's what I did….
  Donna 2.0 got her debut performance, with a quick-n-dirty padding job. The dress was in two pieces, so the first step was to shorten the underdress. And I have to say, I like New Donna's hem-marking feature, which made it a lot easier to trim it off! (Though I'm guessing I was supposed to put a marking tool in the clamp instead of shoving the fabric in there…)
  Once that was all trimmed and hemmed and everything, it was time to tackle the lace overdress. First step: take out the shoulder pads (and those satiny cords which I'm guessing were for hanging, but were broken and in the way.) And then more skirt trimming and hemming.
  The sleeves were a bit odd–I think if this had been a different fabric, I might have liked this almost mutton-sleeve-esque detail, but in the lace it just looked kind of frumpy. But that was easy enough to fix– I just chopped about five inches off of those, then hemmed again.
  And so I ended up with this, which was much cuter.
  And I had enough fabric left from the part I cut off for the hem to make a little scarf. (Which I didn't wear with the dress, but we'll see if I incorporate it into a later outfit.)
  My immediate family's already had our gift exchange (we do it on Christmas Eve) and I did get sewing and other crafty goodies other than Donna, but I'll save that for another time.