When Mending and Making Do Becomes Living and Learning

This is one of those projects that were supposed to be an exercise in frugality and turned out to be the opposite. In the beginning, I found I had some pale peach linen (originally bought to make a Halloween costume and never used) and some lightweight peach and green tartan with some black stamping on the underside (bought as a $3 remnant from Value Village) that I thought would make a nice dress for me. So far, so good. But, you ask, why are the two fabrics above a green cotton and a batik cotton instead of a peach linen and a peach and green tartan of unknown fibres? Read on and weep with me.

I bought a pattern, Vogue V1468, that would suit a two-fabric dress. Hey, buying a pattern to make use of fabrics one already has is hardly an unreasonable expense. But then I started to think about how such a pale peach wouldn't look good on me. I am exceptionally fair-skinned and pale colours wash me out. So.... I put the peach linen away for some other purpose and bought a second fabric to go with the peach and green plaid. It was hard to find anything that would coordinate with such a difficult shade of green, but in the end I found a light spring green that I thought would work. Now I was in for the price of a pattern and the main fabric, which I also used for lining. And then... after I'd cut out the green fabric pieces and was set to cut out the contrast sections, I took a very close look at that thrift shop tartan and began to see how poor a fabric it really was, how many pulled threads it had, how thin and insubstantial it felt, how much the black stamps on the wrong side (which showed through to the right side) would interfere with the cut. Ultimately I wound up putting the peach and green tartan in the thrift shop donation bag and buying a contrast batik fabric for this now quite expensive and wholly unneeded dress. I'm not even a fan of batik, but there didn't seem to be much at Fabricland that would go with the spring green fabric.

The finished dress. It turned out well, I don't dislike it, I will wear it... but I didn't need or even particularly want this dress and the money and time I spent on it would have been so much better employed in other ways. I find I have often gotten sucked into spending money on what was supposed to be a "mend and make do" sort of project and turned out to be an expensive folly, and I am going to be much more careful in the future not to let that particular snowball start rolling.