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vintage French sundress

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One day back in early March I was strolling around Gare du Nord in Paris, waiting for a friend to get in from London. I wound up coming up on a shop selling reused goods, and in a bin on the street I found the most fabulous vintage duvet cover. I mean, this is the kind of fabric we all dream about, right? Now, it was freezing cold and I was living out of a 32 L backpack, but I HAD to have this fabric. And it HAD to be a sundress. I wore it with tights and a tan long sleeved shirt for a loooong time.

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So the duvet was €3. I bought thread and elastic at another street market in a town near Limoges for €1,80. So the dress cost about $7! Now here’s the tricky part: I had to sew it all by hand! I’d never sewn something like this by hand, and all those stitches across the bodice for the elastic…. Well, what else was I going to do?!

This dress has been a great souvenir. The materials are all from France, and I remember details of each purchase. I remember doing that green stitching on the skirt while on a train from Barcelona to Madrid. I got those awesomely comfortable shoes that look great with the dress in Munich. I now I can wear it in New Orleans!

The pockets match up with the skirt pattern, so they don’t stand out. They are the perfect size for holding a beer bottle, leaving you free to wave your hands up in the air if you happen to attend a student festival in Krakow… just in case!

These pictures were taken in September at the Old Spanish Fort on Bayou St. John in New Orleans.
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sunny flower dress

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I thought up this design on the looooong drive back from Burning Man–there’s nothing like 2,200 miles alone to get the creative juices flowing. The fabric is a quilting cotton from Joann’s (called “daydream believer,” just in case you need something to hum while looking at the photos).

My favorite part is that I don’t feel the need for a bra with this.

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The dress has inset pockets and an invisible zipper, which is a little short and therefore a bit of a struggle to take the dress off. Oh well.

The photos were taken at the airport, right by all those signs saying “no stopping or waiting or parking!” Yeah, I showed them!

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polychromatic pachyderms

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Behold, my bad ass elephant T shirt!

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I actually got a picture before I started sewing.

I traced out 24 elephants from tear-away stabilizer, laid them all out, then went over the lines in backstitch. The stabilizer was really great and easy to remove. The numbers on the elephants correspond with my thread, which I also numbered. It was a pretty easy project and didn’t take too long. Well, about 10 hours. I used a T from American Apparel that I got on discount.

And one more for the road!

Here are the pictures of Katie’s black shirt. Her last name means “Elephant Herder.”

This shirt was a Craftster featured project in September 2009, and it was used as the main photo for a Craftster article on elephant themed projects in February 2010!
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