Monday, May 23, 2011

Vintage Sheets: The New Summer Dress?

The other week, a polite young man asked me whether I made my dresses from vintage sheets.*

I do not make my dresses at all, but I did see his point.  In the spring and summer I tend to wear cotton dresses with large prints--white and green, white and blue, white and citron--that could very well be made from sheeting.

Perhaps I could make some floaty dresses from these Garnet Hill sheets:



Or perhaps even from curtains, depending on the thickness of the fabric.

Making dresses from curtains is nothing new, as Maria (not yet von Trapp) will tell you:
  

Here is one of the curtain dresses from The Sound of Music up for auction:
  

Scarlett O'Hara also knew a thing or two about transforming curtains . . .
  

as did Carol Burnett's Scarlett: 
    

I like this Bob Mackie sketch of Burnett's dress:
    

And I've always like his signature.

*Top image from trueup.net

3 comments:

coffeeaddict said...

I haven't yet made anything out of actual curtains or bed linen, but I do buy fabric that's designed for household linens and make dresses out of it. Does that count?
In fact I once bought an argyle patterned cotton so similar to our bed linen and made a maxi dress with it,that my partner anxiously asked me what happed to our bed linen.

Miss Cavendish said...

That definitely counts!

Mardel said...

I too have bought fabric that was designed for household linens to make dresses, and when I was in my 20's I made a few dresses out of actual sheets. I've thought about it since, but haven't yet taken the plunge again.

I've always adored Carol Burnett in that dress.