Quaint Costumery: The 24 Hour Day Dress

(Totally not photographed in front of a curtain hung up on the garage door)

One thing you'll soon discover about me is the fact that I'm not great at rushing a project. Honestly, who would think that the pairing of perfectionism and immense lack of skill might hold up projects at all?

With this dress, I didn't have the luxury of time. See, despite the focus of this blog, my main area of study for the past few years has been film-making. Well, I'm not really the most original when it comes to thinking up ideas, and I'd recently got round to seeing La La Land (yeah, it only took me over a year), so I decided I'd give the whole modern+retro style a try. We usually leave the task of sourcing costumes to our actors and/or fashion students, and as far as I knew, we were all set in the matter.
That was until a couple of days before the shoot. It turns out our lead actress hadn't realised she didn't actually have a summer dress that still fitted her. You can imagine the panic I was in when I got the news at three in the morning on the Thursday before our Saturday shoot. I didn't have time to buy anything online or trawl through charity shops for something, so my only option was to run to the nearest fabric shop as soon as I got home that evening, and pray that there was something I could use there.

What meets me at the very front of the shelf as soon as I get to the patterns section?

"Fast & Easy". My problems are over! Blue gingham and red binding? Sure. I'm too tired to think of anything for myself. It wasn't exactly what I wanted, but the content of my video was easy enough to change on the day from modern+retro to full blown vintage.

As soon as I'd picked up all the fabrics and notions, I rushed to my sewing machine and cut, pinned, and sewed into the night.

Taken at some ungodly hour.
Still rather proud that I got this far in my sleep-deprived state.

I managed most of the easy stuff before exhaustion forced me to pause my efforts and sleep, but I was back to work the moment I woke the next morning, and was more than grateful when I had finished sewing on those six metres or so of binding, to finally have a minute for breakfast somewhere around half-five.

But there you go! I actually made a dress in less than 24 hours. It's certainly a feat for me. And it just goes to show that you don't need a proper binding presser foot to do the perfectly mediocre job that you'd do using it the first time anyway.