Lace dress refashion

I have been dying to share this dress with you all (which I hinted about here) - but I dithered on hemming it for AGES (I really have an issue with hemming...I don't know why!). But, it is finally done and ready for it's big reveal.

This whole project started out because I nabbed a rather large and unflattering navy blue lacy 'dress' for £1 from Primark (I'm normally not a Primark supporter as I am doubtful about how they can mass produce clothing for so little without it having some unethical aspect along the line - but that's a whole other story! Plus the quality is really crap and I hate this 'throw away' society shops like this have played a part in creating - 'we' have no respect for clothes anymore....sorry, rant over). I had no intentions of keeping the dress in its original form, but because I had picked up a size 16 (largest that was left) I had a fair bit of fabric to play with:

The dress needed to be underlined/lined and I had originally thought something dramatic and bright, like hot pink. But when I held up the pink under the lace it looked mega tacky! So with a bit of searching around my local fabric store, I happened upon an off cut of taupe lining in the remnant bin - for a lovely bargain of about £2! I think the taupe colour (which is not normally a colour I gravitate towards) provides a more elegant aspect.

The plan was to use the bodice from a pattern and then 'make-up' the skirt. I had originally planned to make the whole dress out of the lace, but once I started laying out the pattern pieces it became evident that that wasn't going to be possible. So the midriff section was made using only the lining material. I do like the contrasting aspect, but to be honest, it is one layer of polyester lining material, so it is neither very secure nor flattering in certain angles!

The bodice is made from New Look 6557, view C (the yellow dress on the pattern cover). I made the skirt by joining strips of lace together to make the largest rectangle I could, cut a strip the same size out of the lining, and then gathered.

A shot of the back - again totally from lining, because I didn't have enough lace. I used an invisible zip, which had to be picked out a couple of times because I wasn't getting the waist line joined up perfectly - turned out my two back pieces were slightly different sizes (er - how does that kind of thing happen?!!!)! Easy enough to fix though - thank goodness! The straps are made of navy ribbon.

My favourite part of the dress is the underlined bodice, it turned out so well and I just love the colours together. It's perhaps a little big for me, but fine when I wear a bra - I just need to go and buy a navy one so that it's not so noticeable!

All in all, I do like the dress very much. I honestly only made it as a challenge to myself, and as such, I'm very happy with the results. However, I don't see myself wearing this dress very much - to be honest, I don't know what occasion it would be most appropriate for. But it ended up costing me less than £5 in total to make - so not a massive loss!