New Look 6000 - dematernified*

Wednesday 14 November 2018
*dematernified: the act of refashioning maternity clothes into normal sized clothes.


Cleaning up my sewing room recently I found many unfinished projects (aka UFOs) once again piling up in random places. Every few years I seem to go through a cycle where I try to either finish them off or cull them but I never get them all done and before I know it I've added way more to the pile! Well, here I go again.....

In my UFO pile I found a dress I made around 7 years ago when I was pregnant with my second child from New Look 6000 (an old favourite). I held onto it not because I was planning to have another child but because I made it from a good quality ponti knit which is hard to find and because this is a favourite dress pattern and it deserved to be worn for more than just a few months.


To turn it into a maternity version in the first place I simply made it a size larger, added extra length to the front and placed gathers on both side (see this post here). To de-maternify it, I unpicked all the pieces and simply cut out the pattern pieces in the right size - and then it sat in my UFO pile for the past few years. No good reason why - I was just clearly distracted by newer and shinier projects!

On a recent sewing weekend away with some sewing friends it took me about 2 hours to finally sew this dress and now I have a new dress just in time for the warmer weather we're having here in Sydney. Honestly, at the end of finishing each UFO I always wonder why I left it for so long!


There's not much to say about this dress - it's a very simple make but is really flattering which is why a bajillion seamstresses have made it and the pattern is still for sale over at Simplicity. I've made this version with cap sleeves because even though I love the elbow length sleeves with button tabs they are impossible to get into jacket sleeves and it's so cold in my office that I definitely need that.

I guess the most obvious difference is in the side view - no more preggo belly (just a mum tum though).

In the photo above I was only 21 weeks and I grew much larger so it was lucky that there was a lot of extra fabric in the front. Check out the photo below to see how much larger I got - this photo was 5 days before I gave birth to a 4.5kg (9lb 14oz) baby:


Finally how awesome is the necklace I'm wearing? It's from an Australian company called Ruby Olive and this plain black dress is just perfect for showing it off.

  

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