Maternity Dress Alteration

     Austin has VERY FEW options for maternity clothes.  It's Motherhood Maternity and then tiny tiny corners of department stores that specialize in selling clothes that are black and grey.  It's so hard to find color!  Oh and stripes.  Black, grey, and stripes.  Ugh.  So depressing for Spring!  I found a thrift store that buys clothes from people and re-sells them.  So it's the Plato's Closet of maternity and kid clothing.  I have found quite a few things there, shorts/pants are usually about $7 each and dresses are between $10 and $15.  Shirts are about $8.  Definitely more doable than $25-$30 shirts at Motherhood Maternity.  Well anyway, I bought this thrifted dress a while back.  It's from GAP Maternity, so pretty good quality and a great dark purple color (the lighting was being difficult for these pictures!)

But, the length was pretty borderline.  I hate worrying about dresses and skirts and keeping them down in Church (or anywhere), while I'm walking, and especially while I'm sitting.

      Please excuse the self portraits in our bathroom mirror.  I needed a before shot.  Anyway,  I went to Jo-Anne's and found the perfect fabric to add to the bottom.  I excitedly went to work and spent an entire evening sewing 6 inches to the bottom of the dress.  My first idea and instinct was to just make a layered look.  But, for some reason I chose to go for a ruffle.  I'd seen it on a blog and thought it looked fine.  Well, I finished the ruffle and tried on the dress.  It was hideous.  The ruffle looked SO BAD.  I was heartbroken.  I'd just spent lots of time and energy making a dress ugly.  I wish I had taken a picture, you would shudder if you saw it.  So, I pushed the project aside and took time to calm my troubled heart (as is often necessary during sewing projects gone wrong).  Soon after, I took a seam ripper to all my hard work and removed the ruffle, removed the gathers, and then put the dress in the closet for a few weeks.  Well, last night I finally got up the motivation to try again.  This time, I went with my original idea.  It really didn't take long at all to do and when I finished and tried it on I was so pleased!
     Here's a close up of the fabric that I added to the bottom, it was the perfect shade of yellow to go with the dark purple.

     I added a belt to the waist to give it a bit of style and oila, a rather plain border-line length dress was transformed into a trendy dress that made this pregnant woman very happy!