I threw dress 12 together in a hurry when I realized we had tickets to the closing night of the Toronto International Film Festival at Roy Thompson Hall. They used the word ‘gala’ on the ticket and when I looked at all my new dresses, none of them said ‘red carpet’ to me. I had never been to see any films at TIFF before, so I decided a new fancy dress was in order.
Over the years, I have rescued various textiles and threads, not ever knowing what I would do with them. I only knew that they couldn’t be thrown away. I have a box of vintage custom-dyed charmeuse silk remnants. The colours are gorgeous and the fabric is super luxurious. One side of charmeuse is glossy and smooth, while the other side is quite matte. I always imagined they would make lovely fancy dresses, if only I had fancy dress occasions.
I went through the pile of silks and chose a ‘film strip’ grey called, ‘Smoke’. I folded the fabric in half unevenly, to create two layers of fabric. The top shiny side was shorter, revealing the matte side along the bottom. I serged a rolled hem along the top fold with light pink embroidery thread and did the same on the two bottom hems. I sewed a quick seam up the length of the fabric to make a ‘tube’. I think you know what’s coming next – shirring. Three sets of three closely spaced lines of shirring and my dress was done! I had thoughts of doing a dress more complicated or even just cut on the bias, but it was Friday night and the film was on Saturday. Plus, I wanted to watch episode 2 of Gossip Girl. My girl crush on Blair is growing. She is by far the most interesting girl on that show.
I wore my Chie Mihara grey shoes with the dress. They are one of my prized shoe possessions and they were a perfect match to the grey silk dress.
The movie, “Stone of Destiny”, is based on a true story about four university students who plan a heist to steal back the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey in England and return it to Scotland. It’s a sweet, feel good movie and I enjoyed watching it all dressed up in my fancy new dress.
ONE MORE DRESS TO GO! Dress 13 has no shirring, I promise. I’m super excited, as it uses cute Japanese fabric and will be the perfect ‘fall transition’ dress. Perhaps worn with coloured tights? If I can pull that off.
