A-B-C, Easy as 1-2-3

Mondays need all the help they can get, as I’ve said more than once. So if you have a chance, wear something that gives you a boost on Monday. For me, that was a dress I just finished today, Monday. I’m calling it my “A-B-C, Easy as 1-2-3” dress.

 

Its story begins more than a year ago.

One day I found some fun, colorful fabric at a thrift store and bought it for $3 or something like that. I had immediate plans to transform it into a fun dress. Fast forward a year or more. Finally I’ve made the dress I was all set to make the day I discovered the fabric. A reasonable person might ask, “Sarah, why did it take you more than a year to make such a delightful dress?” What do you think the answer is?

A)     I had so many future sewing projects already and this one ended up waiting a while.

B)      The kids kept me busy 16 hours a day for the last year+.

C)      I cut the fabric wrong early on and didn’t want to deal with figuring out how to fix it.

D)     All of the above.

Yep, you were right: D!

I’ll share a few more details because I’m very human and I’ve decided it is much better to share my wacky mistakes than to pretend I don’t make them. I really did cut the fabric wrong. In my enthusiasm to get this dress going, I forgot that I couldn’t just fold the fabric in half, cut once and make a front and a back. I ended up having a piece with upside down ABCs. Ooops. Even as wacky as I am, I didn’t want my ABCs to be upside down on one side and right side up on the other. The solution? Put the fabric away for approximately a year until I ran across it again and gave myself a talking-to along these lines: Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, this is insane. You need to turn this into a dress. No more waiting.

And so I finally did. And I’m biased, but I think it does bring some cheer to Monday. I posed in a Kindergarten classroom at my kids’ school because this A-B-C dress goes very well in that setting.

The fringe at the bottom of the dress is actually quilt binding, cut into pieces that are approximately 4” long. I decided on the multi-colored effect because I had quilt binding in six fun colors and an extra colorful border on a colorful dress makes for EXTRA FUN!

If you happen to have colorful accessories (and clearly I do), this dress calls for them. I paired the dress with bright pink shoes, a pink hat and multi-colored pom-pom earrings I made from felt. Add polka dot sunglasses if it is sunny. If you don’t have polka dot sunglasses, you can create some quite easily if you have nail polish. Add random dots of colorful nail polish to your sunglasses and allow to dry. Even sunglasses need some personality.

 

Well, I hope you’re surviving your Monday. On my coast it’s inching toward Tuesday, which means Friday is almost here. (Yes, that interpretation might be a little optimistic but let’s go with it. Let’s think positively.) Happy Monday!