lousy photos are better than nothing, right?

it rained all day yesterday. a steady, drippy rain that was just what all the flower and vegetable beds needed. it was overcast and just perfect for movies on the couch with popcorn.

so that’s what the googies did yesterday afternoon. it was great.

i took the time to work through some of my upcycle/mend/repair/alter pile. which has become alarmingly large.

ava has a tendancy to kneel on the fronts of her dresses, ripping them apart at the front seam where skirt and bodice join.
throw it in my sewing area, i always say—fully intending to get to it later.

which i don’t.

number of dresses in ava’s closet to wear < number of ava’s dresses in my sewing area to mend.
and that’s not a good sitch.

so i buckled down and did some bleeeh work that doesn’t make for good times or good blogging.

i did, however, pull this little number out of the pile.

a hand-me-down from a grab bag. initially i tossed it aside as too short for either of the bigger girls (it’s a size 14 on my size 3 daughter, so that should give some indication of it’s length…or lack thereof).
the cute ruffled top and elastic waist gave me pause…so i dug it back out thinking it would be easy enough to alter for gigi.

after trying it on her and marking* about how much needed to come in on each side and how much higher the waist should be, i took it off her and cut it in half.

*and of course it’s understood that by “marking” i mean “looking at it and pinching the shoulders and saying ummm…probably about 1.5” here and about 1” here. okay good, take it off.”

i took in the waist—i left the elastic attached and just sewed a new seam about an inch in on either side, tapering back out to the existing side seams, and cut off the excess.

i did the same thing to the top—new seams in the shoulders and in the side seams, taking about an inch off all of them.

then i simply reattached the top and bottom, stretching the elastic to fit and sewing it right on top of the bottom two rows of ruffles on the shirt part.

the entire process took about 10 minutes and cost a whole whopping $0.

score.

unfortunately, the “after” shots suffered from the same poor lighting conditions as the “before” shots. rain is not a photographer’s best friend. ;)

these were the best of the bunch. please ignore the crazy bracelet i made her out of the remnants.

truly—getting these few shots decent looking was a challenge…most of what i took pretty much looked like this:

for some reason when i’m in an indoor flash-necessary situation my limited photography knowledge pretty much flies out the window and i’m kind of just blindly turning knobs and clicking buttons. sad.

but hey, a lousy pic is better than none at all, right? ;)