Value-Added

The girls at Patty's Place were dressing for the reception which the Juniors were giving for the Seniors in February. Anne surveyed herself in the mirror of the blue room with girlish satisfaction. She had a particularly pretty gown on. Originally it had been only a simple little slip of cream silk with a chiffon overdress. But Phil had insisted on taking it home with her in the Christmas holidays and embroidering tiny rosebuds all over the chiffon. Phil's fingers were deft, and the result was a dress which was the envy of every Redmond girl. Even Allie Boone, whose frocks came from Paris, was wont to look with longing eyes on that rosebud concoction as Anne trailed up the main staircase at Redmond in it. -- from Anne of the Island, by L.M. Montgomery

Earlier this summer, I stopped into Walmart to get a few things, and as I walked over to the tills, I passed this dress. It's a cotton broderie anglaise dress, which means it's got eyelets and white embroidery all over it. It was a good price and quite summery and pretty. I thought to myself, "That might be a fun dress to play around with." This is actually the back of the dress, as I didn't have the foresight to take a photo of it before I started messing around with it:

I originally thought it might be fun to try to dye it, but my recent foray into embroidery sent me in another direction. I thought it might be fun to add a bit of colour to it by embroidering over some of the existing white flowers. My original idea was to go over them with yellow and brown thread to give it the look of tiny sunflowers all over it:

And while that was pretty, I quickly got bored of just doing the one colour. I also tried hard to give it the "random spots of colour" look, but my Type A personality required order and pattern, so I ended up giving myself a lot more work by adding flowers in a regular pattern:

Needless to say, it took WAY longer than I anticipated. In the middle of this project, I took a break to work on the dress I wore to the wedding a couple of weeks ago, and I also took a couple of breaks from the sheer tedium of it. I love polka dots and tiny flower patterns and ditzy florals, but MAN is it boring to do.

But last week, I finally finished it. And it's super cute:

AND IT HAS POCKETS. Is that not the criteria of sheer perfection for an outfit?

So, as much as I said I'm missing my knitting, I'm really glad I decided to give this a go. And my next project was going to be a knitting project, but I actually decided to try my hand at another sewing project in the meantime... which is not going great at the moment, but I'm trying to finish it so that I can feel like I'm getting better at sewing... which I'm not sure I really feel like doing now...

But oh well. I'll be back to my knitting needles soon enough, as soon as the weather cools down, whenever that's going to be.

Off to fire up the barbecue for dinner. Have a great week!