Refashioned striped dress

Still catching up with all my 2019 makes, took the photos, but got sidetracked by Me Made May and now I have a mountain of unedited pictures. Hey ho! at least I’m starting, with this refashioned dress.

I bought it in a charity shop without trying it on, it’s a size L (from Zara) so I thought it would definitely be fine. Turns out it was not, it was uncomfortably snug over the bottom half (#bubblebuttproblems). Thankfully it came with a belt in the same fabric, which made some emergency refashioning possible. I opened up the belt, and used the resulting fabric to add a side panel. I think it works pretty well! I hadn’t quite considered that the panel would break up the line quite so much, and it’s really a bit shorter than I would like – I haven’t worn this again with just tights, but then I like the dress over trousers thing even when the dress is long enough to wear on its own. I’ve actually worn this lots and I wasn’t sure that I would!