Today's dress came all the way from Missouri, from my gal Samantha. She sent this to me, along with another stunner that will be perfect for refashioning this summer, both coming from her great aunt's collection. Her great aunt passed in 2006 and this dress was something Miss S was going to redo for herself. I got lucky as Samantha, pregnant when she sent, offered me the pieces to use. "I've been holding onto them for about 3 years now, dying to restyle them, but I am not the best seamstress and I just do not have the time. Also, I'm pregnant, so there's no way I'd be wearing them anytime soon if I did decide to forge ahead."

I reaped the awesome vintage benefits of this dress...

The material was heavy and the dress well crafted. I'm just going to make a few small changes to update this piece and make it a little more current, but I did love this brown/beige/ivory/chestnut brown mixed palette!

It's kind of tricky to see in the before shot, but the top of the dress had lovely metallic threading going on with all the brown flowers. That extra sheen was awesome!

I took my scissors and trimmed the sleeves in half. The length was a little off for me and the sleeve got tapered as it got to my wrist, but it was still a bit large.

Post sleeve trimming, I got to the length of the dress next. I'm a long dress girl for sure, but this fabric was super heavy and thick and it just seemed to weigh the entire piece down, so I took it up to my knees.

After both trims were made, I took the dress to my sewing machine (um, "Takin it to the Streets" just popped in my head - I'm putting the Michael McDonald classic in below, so feel free to play the video for the rest of the post to hear what I've been humming in my head. This is what it's like to be in the Marisa mind set :)

So, back to taking the dress to the sewing machine...

I hemmed the bottom of the dress as well as the sleeves and we were good as gold!

With this dress, I felt it was all about the accessorizing to really give it a modern twist. I layered vintage gold chains and necklaces, wore argyle brown stockings, and a pair of chestnut oxfords that I scored at a sample sale for $20. I still had my jacket on this am as I went to the Coffee Bean for office pick-me-ups.

The piece looked like this without the jacket on top...shorter sleeves worked much better for me. This is something that if you're knee deep in snow right now you can pair with a cardigan to make it more temperature appropriate at the office, or depending on how high the heat is cranked wear it like so.

I had in a frozen margherita pizza in the oven from Trader Joe's (chilly/windy night calls for comfort food!) and have to say that my cornucopia oven mitt matched so well that I had to pose with that tonight.