House of Estrela: |day 19| Refashion Month Guest: Suzanne from Winter Wonderings Wanderings & Whatnot

2013-07-19

|day 19| Refashion Month Guest: Suzanne from Winter Wonderings Wanderings & Whatnot

I can't stop going back to my guest's |of the day| blog. She's Suzanne, from Winter Wonderings Wanderings & Whatnot. I started following her just a little bit before she competed for Run & Play and has been one of my favourite bloggers ever since. I love that just like me, she works on the cheap, and creates amazing pieces out of old ones. Besides, have you seen her photography skills?

Hi everyone, I'm Suzanne from Winter Wonderings... and if you haven't been over to my blog you might not know that I LOVE refashioning. In fact I competed in Project Run and Play through almost complete refashioning (The Cost of Competing)... I have a feeling that may be my only claim to fame ever... but I digress. I also started Operation: Project $0 last summer, and watch out - I'll be doing it again!!! I was so excited to be asked to participate in a month of refashions - HOW AWESOME!!!

Today I am going to share with you my Crumb Catcher Dress. I was scanning through FB one day and saw a dress, I liked the dress, I looked at the dress and thought 'you, dress, are made of rectangles'. And then I promptly forgot about the dress. That is until I inherited a bag of cloth napkins that my mom was getting rid of. They were cloth napkins that she had made years ago for a country banquet out of normal cotton - rectangles of cotton to me are GOLD (sheets, table cloths, curtains... woohoo)... I mean it is just fabric, right! The great thing about cloth napkins is that all the edges are finished for you, thus saving you time and energy, win/win!!!

Now cloth napkins can vary in size and weight of fabric... I'd look for ones in the cotton-linen family (medium to lightweight). If you have contrasting napkins - that is great, if not it will still look awesome, I promise!

For this project you will need 3 cloth napkins approximately 19inx20in (2 in your main fabric and one in the contrast if you want contrast)

This is a beginner friendly and QUICK project - it lends itself to any embellishments you can dream up (although I kept mine simpler). This project could also be done with fat quarters... but then it wouldn't be a refashion.

All you really need to remember to make this little dress, is the number 4 - everything you cut will be four inches wide. Yep EVERYTHING... well, except one thing, but don't worry about that ;op

You will end up with 2 main dress sections, 2x 4inch contrast sections for bodice lining, 3x 4 inch contrasting fabric for the sash, 2x 4 inch main fabric sections for the straps. And a 1.5 inch strip that will be turned into bias for your belt loops.

Two casings and 2 rows of 3/8 elastic are part of what make this dress achieve

the perfect crumb catcher front.

Come on over to my blog for a full tutorial (size 12-24m, although I think this could size up to a 3 T as a top) and see how I went from dinnerware to outerwear ;o) *And yes, it sure does catch the crumbs!

Here are some of my Favorite Refashions: