How to fix a tear in a dress! (creatively)

Awhile ago, someone gifted us a bunch of clothes, which was really awesome, since most of the items were exactly the things my daughter wanted.

There was a red pinafore-type dress in there, that would have been cute, if it didn't have a big rip right in the front.

I decided to get out the craft supplies and fix it! Felt to the rescue!

I stated by doing a Pinterest search for felt flowers and then free-handed one on a scrap of thicker paper (a good use for the million of tear-out cards that are in every magazine). I made 3 flowers in different sizes.

I was going to just plop the flower on top of the tear, when I got the genious idea to just continue the thread down to make a stem. I used the machine to make the leaves too, by adjusting the width of the zigzag as I went along. I then just sewed the flowers on and voila!

A super cute fix to an unsightly problem! I think it turned out great!

Maternity Extravaganza!

Lately I've been getting tired of wearing the same old maternity clothes that I've been wearing for my last 2 pregnancies (they've survived some of my friend's pregnancies as well!). Last pregnancy, I purchased a dress from Old Navy that turned out to be just hideous. I've come to this conclusion after much thought about it, and probably only wearing it once, because I realized it had such potential, but something just wasn't right about it. So I turned it into this dress:

And I like it so much better now! I followed this tutorial, using an old tank, some elastic and the skirt off the hideous dress. My advice is to put the skirt on first, and then try it on over the tank top, pinning it where you want and then sewing it together. I tried sorta just eye-balling where to put the tank part first, and had to take it apart because it got a little bulgy in places and didn't lay quite right. I chose this particular tank for this project because 1) it was one size too big already (perfect for a growing baby body) and 2) because it had bleach spots on it. I honestly don't know where those spots came from, because I never use bleach, but that's another story! I realized that some of the little spots where near the top, so after reading about this tutorial on how to change up your dark t-shirts using a bleach pen, I decided to give it a try! Here's how it turned out up close, before I washed it:

And after (which really doesn't do it justice, the lighting is so bad it looks like two different shirts! I promise it's the same one, and that the background color remained the same):

Using the bleach pen was fairly easy (I just put a towel underneath and then washed it separately after about 10 minutes. I'd like to try it again, using a shirt that isn't ribbed, which I think would work better. And I'm going to have to work on my art skills too, maybe find a drawing somewhere that I like and copy it. Overall the dress took an hour or two to make, which made this a really easy, cheap project and finally, something fun for me! ~Patricia