Shell See Ya Later! : A Designing Women Dress Refashion

Wow, it has been so hectic with soccer practice and games, grading, midterm creating, and Thanksgiving and D.C. trip preparing!  Winter may be a once a week time; at least until soccer is over.  Anyway, I can totally imagine one of the cast of Designing Women full of then-hip ladies dressing to the nines for work everyday wearing this dress.  That was a terrible sentence, but I'm sticking with it.   

Danger Will Robinson!

This dress, unfortunately, was not doing anything remotely favorable for me. What to do with this monstrosity?

 The shoulders (oh the shoulders), the blousy top, and that matching belt: yeesh.  First thing I wanted to do was get rid of the blousiness on top; I'm not against it in general but wanted to see what dropping the waist would do.    I also removed the sleeves (and shoulder pads) for good measure.

Drop the waist like it's hot

At first, I was worried since dropping the waist made it look like this.  

Please quickly forget you ever saw this picture

Don't mind the tennis shoes, and I swear I did not go out into public like this.  Needless to say, quite a bit of apprehension followed this picture.  Luckily, removing the sleeves opened up the arm holes quite a bit, so I could take the dress up at the shoulders to get the waistline at...wait for it...my waist.  I also decided to fold the front down a bit into a v-neck, also allowing for the whole thing to be taken up quite a bit.

I also wanted to be able to reuse the belt, but man, the seashell on seashell action was not working for me.  I did like the puka shell buckle, though.  Luckily for me, the back of the belt was a matte black, so a little switcheroo was in order!

Line marks the spot!

I cut the whole end of the thing off since I had the extra room anyway, and then I marked where I needed the hole for the prong, flipped the belt over, applied a little glue, and secured it to dry!

Office supplies gone rogue

I even used the little strap they include for hanging dresses up (even when they have sleeves; I really don't get that at all) to create a little loop to hold down the end of the belt.  I added a little white cardigan and this is what I ended up with!

Ready for work

I hope everyone had a safe and happy Thanksgiving!  Cheers!