Refashioning and honesty

You may remember I made this a few months ago:

This is a Colette Wren dress that I was in deep denial about. I loved this fabric, loved the idea of it all, was so pleased to have managed to squeeze an entire dress, including sleeves, out of 1.2m of fabric, and I wasn't prepared to entertain the notion that this dress was anything other than a success. Even though it's clearly, clearly not. 

This dress doesn't work. The fabric doesn't want to be doing what I was trying to make it do, the colours don't look good next to my face, this is WAY too much print for me to be wearing all over. The one time I wore it out I felt hideously self-conscious and was actually relieved that the restaurant was cold enough for my boyfriend to insist I wear his jacket. Yet still I wrote the post all "well, it's not as successful as the last one, but once I do a bit of altering I will totally wear it" even though I knew there was nothing I could do to make the thing work the way I wanted it to.

Here is what it looks like now:

It's a miniskirt! I took the top part of the dress off, made an elasticated facing and lopped several inches off the hem. All the weird bits have gone, it's way more versatile, and most importantly I can wear it with a load of black so I don't feel overwhelmed. 

Even having acknowledged that I was never going to wear the dress as it was, I was still stubborn about it. I unpicked the top but refused to cut into the skirt for ages because that would be a waste of material and what was the point in having gone to all that trouble with the layout if I was just going to end up with a miniskirt. It took me nearly a month to get my head round it, I think, and even then I was basically pushed into it by the fear of running out of clothes before the end of Me Made May. I'm really glad I did it, because now I get to wear this fabric and still feel like me in it.

I mentioned in my Me Made May lessons post that I would be trying to write more honestly about the outcomes of my projects, and this is the first step in that direction. The second one will be coming next week, and the photos for that are MUCH worse. So this should be fun, then.