RN Resurrection

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as making something from nothing.

I’ve been engaged to play the part of a nurse in a peer’s stage performance. It’s strictly BYOCostume, which about a year or so ago would have been perfect.

But it’s NOT a year ago and the lovely vintage nurse dress I got from Value Village for $6.99 in 1994 no longer exists – at least not in its entirety. I dismantled and cut up most of the uniform to make a very posh formal tea server’s outfit.

I tried to replace it using a lazy solution first – sussing out a few thrift stores and a couple of vintage consignment stores to see if I could purchase a replacement. One store did have a nurse’s dress that kinda fit, but it didn’t wow me $95.00 worth, so I went to Plan B.

Plan B is much more challenging and labour intensive than Plan A. It involves gathering all the existing pieces left over from the tea-server scalpelling, trying to extrapolate a usable pattern from the remains of the nurse’s dress, and then sewing my own new nurse’s dress.

Part of the front of the original dress is in my right hand, part of the back is in my left (yes, only parts because I cut into both of them to make a very proper pleated apron). I reverse engineered (aka picked apart) the existing pieces and traced patterns for the pleated bib, collar, and cuffs off of the tea-server’s dress where I had retrofitted them.

I bought 3 meters of heavy white cotton for $18.00 at Dressew. Today I managed to get about a third of the sewing done. Here are a few pics of it pinned roughly in place on the dress judy:

Front.

Side.

Back.

It’s shaping up quite nicely (“and very accurate to the original” she added, feeling very clever and cheeky).

FYI: the nurse’s cap was bought from Dressew for $5.69.