After much desperate avoidance I eventually got around to going through my wardrobes the other day to decide what I wanted to keep and what I really should get rid of. I hate this job and can only bring myself to chuck the bare minimum. But I always need room for more clothes so inevitably there has to be a clothes cull at some point. Amongst the stuff I really should get rid of because I never wear it, was a dress I bought when I was fifteen / sixteen. It was the first item of 'genuine goth' clothing I ever bought and I even had to go into the 'bad' area of town to buy it. It bore the emblem of a film I was obsessed with and it was black (my colour of choice) and had trailing sleeves. I had to have it and so I did, although I was never comfortable with quite how high up the slits on either side of the dress were, a real thigh glimpser! Because the dress conjures up so many memories, it had been hanging around in the back of my wardrobe for years. Looking at it, lying between the mountainous 'keep' pile and the more modest 'throw,' pile, I knew I couldn't just throw it in the bin and trying to sell it on eBay didn't seem right either.
So I decided to turn it into a bag, salvaging as much of the material as I could and using a pattern from a Cath Kidston book I was given at Christmas.
It was a pattern I had followed before but quite some time ago so I made a whole bunch of silly mistakes and had to improvise to fix them. I used an old dark green slip to line the bag and attached a long velvet ribbon, I already owned, to be the strap. I fixed the strap on using some red buttons from a button collection my mother gave me.
So it cost me nothing to convert the dress into a bag but it did take me practically a whole day to construct it. I want to do more machine sewing projects but I find it much less relaxing than cross stitch, I do have a bunch of cute dress patterns though so I really need to get on it.
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