Thrift shop find makes nice summer dress

This lovely blue dress I got for a few dollars in the local Goodwill Thrift shop last year.  And, inspired by the Refashionista , I fidgeted with it on the sewing machine and this is how it ended up!  Unfortunately, I forgot to take a photo of what it originally looked like!          But it had blousy elbow-length sleeves, hung down to around my ankles and was way too wide or basically hideously hanging on me.   It was probably a Medium size and needed a slash down from me.  But I loved the almost periwinkle blue color and its pattern, the V-neck, the shiny shell like buttons and how light and summery the fabric felt.  So I chopped the sleeves and made them into little cap sleeves, took in the side seams about an inch each and hacked about 6 inches off the hem.  That piece I turned into a belt that you can see tied around the waist.  I think it came out all right!   It's easy to wear in the summer heat and washes and dries quickly as the fabric is some sort of light weave. 

Baggy Brown 80s dress Gets a Make Over from Size 12 to Size 4

It must have been the floral print on the brown black background that got me. As well as the shirt front neckline and the buttonholes down the front with self-fabric covered buttons, all nicely worked and hard for me to have sewn myself (as if I could be bothered!).  I snagged this dress at a Salvation Army store and, inspired by other sewing queens on Pinterest, I felt compelled to buy this dress -- a Size 12 --  which is way too big for me,  for $3.99 and challenged myself to see if I can do the Tim Gunn "make it work" refashionista thing and to turn it into something I would actually wear out of the house, that is, into a Size 4 summer dress.  Basically it was a  massive hack-down: I slashed 2 inches out of each side seam and cut off 6 inches off the bottom and hemmed it. I also took in every one of the four vertical darts another inch or so to get the volume of the dress down even smaller and give it more curves! The piece that got cut off the bottom became a self tie belt.   I ripped out the lumpo shoulder pads and snipped out the sleeves completely, then shortened the two shoulder seam widths by about half an inch and hemmed the arm hole openings.  After a jolly good ironing, I tried it on and hey presto chango, had meself a new dress.  I've gotten a few compliments wearing this out as it has a dressy look but is very comfortable, machine washable, and cool to wear! 

Woman in Plexiglass

This is not really "a woman" but a mannequin and in this case (hah!) it is the clothes on the dummy that make the difference.  In the Navy Yard Museum in S.W. Washington is an actual uniform and shoes from the Women's Army Corps. (WAC) in World War II. It's a very tailored dark grey-green dress with a big pleat, a belt and blouse type top with huge lapels and long sleeves cuffed and buttoned. In fact, there's a lot of buttons to the whole outfit and one wonders if the phrase "all buttoned up" originates with this one particular dress. You don't hear much about those ladies who broke that particular non-plexiglass ceiling, but their motto, or responsibility as spelled out in their training manual,  is pretty interesting:-- "Your Job: To Replace Men. Be Ready To Take Over." That must have been pretty scary for some fellas at the time to hear! In fact, I can practically hear my former father-in-law, who fought at Pearl Harbor and other Pacific sites, muttering something about how "the women are always wanting to take over" when my then mother-in-law shooed him out of the house while she was cooking.  From Wikipedia I have learned that there were 150,000 WACs and some of them landed at Normandy too!  Apparently, they were disbanded in 1978 when recruitment into the armed forces seems to have become de-linked from gender. It goes without saying but must always be said, that women have always been given parts to play in all of history.