Stretchy and strapless
Who would wear a strapless dress in winter? Only a crazy person, right? Oh…
That would be me…
I made this dress years ago (looking back at this, I calculate that it must now be about 9 years old… aggh, where did that time go!?) but haven’t worn it much lately, so was considering opshopping/swapping it or unpicking it to make something else. But then I needed something to wear on a day when I was going to be eating a LOT, so I decided to keep it as it is, because it can so easily go from this…
… to this!
It’s very easy to make – just sew the short sides of a rectangle of fabric (about the size of a bath towel, I suppose?) together to form the back seam, and you’ll have a fat sort of tube…
… then fold over a few centimetres of the top of the tube to form a casing and insert some elastic. (Some good, wide, STRONG elastic if you don’t want wardrobe malfunctions!) You can stop there if you like, but I also made a few tucks along the hemline to give the dress a kind of cocoon-y look. And I added pockets because I had a bit of material left, but also because they look cool and are handy for storing hankies and for keeping hands warm!
Speaking of keeping hands warm, I recently seem to have developed Raynaud’s phenomenon (hopefully only the primary form! Nothing’s shown up in any tests yet) – in fact the first time I noticed it was when I was wearing this dress and my middle finger went completely white. Hmm, I don’t think the phenomenon is linked to this dress, but I hope not! Either way, I won’t be wearing it (or getting cold hands) for a while because I’m off to Vietnam and Laos today and it will be toasty, to say the least. I’ll try to do a post or two from overseas but if my internet access is OK I’ll be putting up pics pretty often on Instagram, so visit me there if you like!