Today my daughter was wearing the dress that I remade for her a couple of days ago, and it looked so nice on her that I thought I should share what I did with you. 

So many times clothing have a little something wrong with them, but it seems to be a big enough thing to get rid of it.  Sometimes it just takes a little bit of thinking and creativity to change it into something appealing and wearable.  This particular dress was given to us – it was a high quality jumper for dressy wear, with a filmy solid colored layer entirely covering the jumper.  You could see the jumper pattern through the filmy layer, but it was the filminess that seemed to give it an elegant look.

But I really didn’t like the filmy layer, no matter how elegant it was supposed to make the jumper look – it didn’t seem like a practical addition to the dress of a young girl.  Because it was such thin material, it easily ripped and the seams kept separating – when I resewed them, they just separated again after wearing it once or twice.  The second time or third my daughter brought it to me to fix, I told her that I had something different in mind for it.  I put it aside until a couple of days ago, and here’s what I did.

I totally removed the filmy layer – I was anticipating this would be a time intensive job; since all of the layers were sewn together, I thought it would mean unstitching and restitching all of the seams of the dress.  Before I did that, I tried to rip the layer cleanly along the edge, to see how it looked.  Amazingly, it looked fine, after I removed all loose threads along the seams, so I kept on going until I had ripped it all off.  That took just a few minutes.  After that, I was left with a plain black and white jumper – well made, but not dressy. 

But when I ripped off the filmy layer, I noticed that there were some embroidered shapes along the bottom side of the dress, which because they were almost folded in half didn’t draw any attention to them.  I removed those, and found that they were beautiful black and white embroidered butterflies.  I attached one in the middle of each jumper strap at an angle, so that each tilted towards the other.  Then I took the remaining four and sewed them across the upper middle half of the jumper, evenly spaced.   Because I sewed them so that all four sides of the butterfly were held back against the fabric, they added a really nice look to the jumper (whereas before they were almost messy, since they were attached in the middle and folded into itself), so it’s again a dress appropriate for Shabbos (Sabbath).

When my 8 year old dd wore this today, my normally observant son and husband both thought it was a new dress.  I told them I remade it from a dress she recently wore, but even with hints, neither of them could figure it out.  It looks totally different, and looks a lot nicer now than it did when it was new!  The repairs probably took a total of twenty minutes, and it was something I was able to do while supervising the kids with their chores and academic work in the morning, so it didn’t take me away from what I would have usually been doing.

Avivah