Lace Dress Refashion

Here's another little dress refashion that my oldest daughter S just completed. It's a vintage lace dress that she purchased from local Etsy shop Wildwood Rose Vintage in the fall and just finished fixing it up for wearing to her graduation ceremony tomorrow.

It fit nicely, and had some nice design features, but she really didn't like the peachy colour.

Sorry for these bad camera phone pictures. The dress is fully lined, with velvet ribbon trim around the neckline. It also had an aged and brittle seam binding hem that needed to be removed.

When considering the purchase, we were talking about dyeing the dress darker, so Patti, from Wildwood Rose Vintage tested the fabrics and determined they were natural fibres and should dye well.

The first step was to remove the dye in a pot of boiling water with dye remover.

This went really fast--within 10 minutes all the dye was gone!

This step was completed back in April, but it wasn't until last week that S had time to dye the dress.

I forgot to take a picture of the navy blue dye bath, but into the washing machine after dyeing!

After a few minor repairs and a challenging hem, it's all done! The hem was challenging because the lining was sewn together in the seams with the lace, but over time the lining stretched out and had to have several tucks made so it could be hemmed together with the lace again.

The velvet ribbon took the dye much more than the lace, which was more than the lining, but it looks quite nice this way. As expected, the peachy teeth of the zipper did not dye, and make an interesting contrast on the back.

Didn't she do a nice job?