Lamour Dress Redo

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A couple of years back, I made my first ever Lamour Dress* out of a vintage sari. It was the first time I'd ever used steel boning, my first ever lapped zip, and also my first attempt at complex pattern matching, yet somehow I managed to not screw it up. Even now, when I've gotten my practice in with I dread to think how many Lamour Dresses, I'm still technically pretty happy with it.

(Original dress, pre-alterations)

Though, for reasons I don't think I even knew when writing up the original blog, I decided to make the skirt maxi length rather than knee length. As I mentioned in my Camelia Dress post a few weeks back, I'm not a maxi dress kinda person, and the long length mixed with the vibrant colour of the sari gave it a definite 1970's/boho chic look that really isn't me, and wasn't even me at the time, either. And so, the dress got relegated to my fix/upcycle pile, never once worn after the photoshoot.

As I've been trying to work my way through my various collections of old clothes, badly made clothes and clothes that no longer fit, I figured it was time to give this a rework. Unlike pretty much everything else in my fixer-uper stash, I was happy with the fabric, happy with the fit and happy with the construction of this garment - it just needed a restyle, and even then, only very minor. Basically, I just needed to shorten the damn skirt.

I had intended to unpick the skirt and shorten from the top edge as I really like the print running just above the bottom hem. But then I realised that the skirt and zip were fully integrated and to unpick all that would have made such a mess, especially as the fabric was so delicate, so I abandoned that idea in favour of the much easier approach of cutting from the bottom and rehemming.

To prepare for cutting, I marked out two measurements on the skirt - the top marking is where I want the skirt to sit when hemmed (I believe this was about 24"), and the second was 1" below this, for my hem allowance, which would be the cut line.

I then carefully cut the excess away, starting vertically at the back seam and working up to my marking, then cutting along this. My reasoning for cutting up along a seam rather than randomly hacking away was to ensure the off cut was left as intact as possible. I'm not really sure what I'll do with the remnant, but at least now I have the possibility of doing something.

(Cutting along the seamline)

(18" wide remnant)

I then pressed the skirt along the upper marking, then folded the raw edge up to this line and pressed again, creating a narrow hem. I then handstitched this down - machine stitching would have been perfectly reasonable, but I was running seriously low on thread and didn't have enough to thread a bobbin.

(Old length vs new)

I then did the exact same thing with the lining skirt, but making sure the finished edge of the lining ended at least 1" above the finished edge of the outer skirt, so there'd be no risk of the lining popping through.

And now the moment you've all been waiting for (if you ignore the spoiler image at the top of this post) - the reveal!

And here's the back view:

And some outside shots for the hell of it.

So there you have it, the easiest transformation ever! Though it was such a simple alteration, it really makes it feel like a completely different dress. I'm so glad I finally got round to giving it the snip, as I feel like the dress actually suits me and my style now, and it's definitely going to be getting a lot of wear in the future. But maybe not the immediate future, as lockdown doesn't give rise to many cocktail dress-worthy occasions...