The Mother’s Day dress that “almost” wasn’t!

Hi everyone,
I was hoping to get to my sewing room today but actually didn’t until after 9:00 this evening…again! UGH!

I was running out of time, so I thought I’d show you something I was wanting to wear to church for Mother’s Day. Last week I was at the Goodwill and found this vintage April Cornell dress. Anyone besides me remember her things? She became famous for her fabrics and bedding, but her clothes were just as pretty. Even though the dress wasn’t bright colors like I generally wear, it was nice and I thought with a dainty cream sweater, it would work… So, I bought it and brought it home to try on. (They’ve taken out the dressing rooms at our Goodwill, but you have 2 weeks to return things if you don’t like them.) I knew it needed to be steamed to get some of the wrinkles out. It smelled like it had been laundered.

Here is a picture of the dress…not the greatest as it looks just flat to me… no shape on the hanger. You might have to enlarge these pictures to see the “flaws” better. Click on any picture to do that.

It has 2 different fabrics used for the fabrics. Rayon at the top in a beige and sort of orangish print, and the bottom is a taupe/blue and some rose. In between the 2 fabrics, there is a light peach ribbon with buttons sewn around the whole dress. The ribbon separates the dress from the chemise and the bottom tier which is very slightly ruffled. There are darts in the front and in the back. Then a little narrow tie cinches up the waist however tight or loose you like.

I tried the dress on and my hubby liked it. I did too, but wanted to make sure it was in good condition because of its age. I like to hold fabrics up to the light so you can see any flaws or holes. Well, I was holding the dress up to the light in my bedroom and got all the way around the hem and the last look I took I saw where someone had obviously ripped a tear in the bottom tier and had tried to fix it themselves by gathering up the tear and hand sewing it together.

Then as I looked a little closer, there was another hole/tear about 6″ from that. Waaaahhhh!

I started to have second thoughts about the dress, thinking maybe it was too far gone and just return it. So, I called my hubby in my sewing room and hung it up like you see in that picture and asked my hubby to come and tell me what he thought…

As I hung it up and was looking at it, (before he got to the room), I noticed another hole in the dress… right smack dab in the front, just about 5 or 6 inches down from the center front… I’m pointing it out so you don’t have to hunt for it…

Well, this is what happened. My hubby liked the dress and said, “Oh, honey, you’ll wear the dress to church, you’ll have a sweater on, nobody is going to see that… (he was thinking of not fixing the hole in the front!!!) Then he said he knew I had fixed worse things than that before… and to just do it… nobody will see it.” I only paid $6.16 for it, so I decided to give it a try.

So here is what I did…

I fixed the small hole in the front first. If I didn’t like it, there was no need to go any further…

I pressed the hole area with my iron and got the threads to lay down. Then I used some Wonder Under fusible webbing on the wrong side of the dress and covered up the hole and then cut a piece of beige fabric (to try and match the fabric background) to cover the Wonder Under. Then I pressed it on the backside… I made sure it nice and sealed up the hole as much as possible…

Can you find it?

Okay, I was happy with that…

Now to the other problem areas…The tears in the bottom ruffle of the skirt. The longer tear had to be unstitched to see if it was a hole without any fabric or just a tear that could possibly be fused together…

It was a tear with a lot of frayed edges…and almost was like a flap…

So, I did the same thing as I did with the hole in front… used Wonder Under on the back and then cut a piece of fabric large enough to go over the Wonder Under… then I pressed it down hard to make it set.

It looked like this when I was finished fusing it in place…

Then I worked on the square-like hole. It did have some threads still connected to each side, so it worked a little better…

Anyway, I won’t bore you with all the steps… I just did the same things as I did with the other tears and holes. When I was finished, I used a little bit of Fray Check on the front side and sealed all the threads…

Here are the rest of my pictures… I think it will be okay… at least to wear one time and if I feel funny, I’ll give it back to the Goodwill… (maybe with a note attached inside for the next buyer!) :o)