Refashioned Sparkle Dress

Every project has a story and of course there’s one for this! Through some searching I found myself on the Art Gallery Fabrics website and noticed their look books. I decided to take a gander and found a few projects that jolted my creativity!

The Wild and Free fabric collection by Maureen Cracknell caught my attention and my hand stopped clicking through the look book when I got to the Sparkle Dress. It looks almost identical to a dress I fell in love with at Anthropologie but passed on buying!

It was at this moment that I decided to enter a contest on Kollabora, since I finally had the perfect project to make! The prize for this contest is a Bernina sewing machine, and since I’m in the market for a new machine, why not give this contest a shot, right? To make timing even more perfect, I have a rehearsal dinner coming up for Drew’s sister’s wedding and needed a dress to wear, and now I have it!

The look book has the link to the PDF of the pattern so it’s FREEEEEEE. It does take 3 yards of fabric and while I am quite obsessed with the fabric the real dress is made out of, the cost to make the exact dress was just a little too much for my wallet right now. I knew I didn’t have that much fabric in my stash but did have a few dresses that I took from my Grandma’s collection when she passed. There was one that had a lot of fabric to work with and the print was adorable.

From my grandma’s dress I used the exterior and the lining, and then bought a yard of black knit for the back piece (1/2 off at JoAnn’s). So in total, this dress cost me $6. SCORE!

The pattern was ok to follow, but I did get stuck at one point. When attaching the back piece, the first diagram threw me off making it hard to understand how to put the pieces together. After talking it over out loud and making myself look like a crazy person to my mom- I figured it out.

This dress is “one size” so there was quite a lot of fabric I needed to eliminate. I took 4.5″ off the hem, and had to sew the side seams up an extra 1″. I also had to close the front v an extra 1″ so I could actually cover my upper body.

This is the perfect summer dress. It is comfortable, stylish and fun! I feel really good in this dress and would love another few of these in my wardrobe. A little shorter and in a bright, colorful print, this would make a great beach cover up. You could also go even shorter and make a cute flowy top for a summer evening. I love the possibilities with this pattern, and recommend giving it a go! I think my Grandma would be pretty happy with what her dress has become.