Months ago I offered to refashion something for a friend's seven year old daughter. She gave me this adult velvet skirt and shrunken cashmere sweater, and I said, "no problem."
After I washed the sweater, and saw that one elbow was stained and that moths had gnawed a sleeve, my enthusiasm waned. Then my ambivalence spread to my feelings about the colors, which I began to imagine were too somber. As is typical of me, I then shoved it all in a sack, in a drawer and forgot all about it.
I guess the perennial back-to-school, new-dress urge hit me today because I finally dug it out, saw the sweater was really quite lovely and decided to do something with it.
First, I darned moth holes and hand-sewed patches over the elbows to hide stains and holes. I used a zig-zag lazy-daisy stitch for the elbow patches that seems as if it should be strong and stretchy. The hardest part was choosing a color for the patches (also from some other bits of old felted sweaters.) Eventually, I settled on an acid green.
I cut off the bottom of the sweater at the center of the waist shaping, and the top of the skirt where it was just a bit bigger than the sweater waist. With the side seams matched up, I sewed them together with a stretch stitch easing the skirt to fit the top. Now I needed some way to tie the colors of the elbow patches to the rest. After much messing about with buttons, ribbons, and leftover sweater bits, I settled on a rather simple flower. The center is a blue button sewn on with bright orange thread. 
The addition of the bright green and orange flower made me feel much happier about the colors. As I was contentedly embroidering with the bright orange, I found myself wondering why it had taken me so long get inspired to do this project.
I met my muse walking through the porch to take a photo before it got dark: a set of old Fisher-Price music box records that I bought a few weeks ago and have left sitting around and in the way.
The sweater is a color between the blue and lavender records, but the patches and thread colors are just the same as the green and orange disks.
I remember reading a quote from a painter a few years ago who said that her work got a lot brighter after she had children and was always seeing their bright plastic toys laying about. At the time, I was feeling disgusted with all the plastic toys in MY house, and wondered how an artist could be influenced by anything so. . . annoying. Now I see I'm (happily) not immune myself.
So here is the dress.
I hope she likes it.
