Little Dress on the Prairie

More like big dress on the prairie, am I right?
The content of my blog posts typically consist of three things:
1. Apologizing for the length of time between my infrequent posts, despite how few are actually reading.
2. Complaining about how the weather never cooperates with my outfit choices.
3. The frustration I experience with the oversized, tent-like '80s dresses.
This one hits all those marks. Le dress:

Many of these dresses are by Liz Claiborne and this is one of them. They're always so big. It's only a size 4, and in the Savers dressing room I thought I could easily make this wearable. Nothing is ever easy, really.

It's always the bodice and its extraneous folds of ballooning material. As usual, I'm drawn to the print. It has a romantic boho kinda style. To start:

This will be the start of my de-collaring series. You see, taking in the sides of these things never does the job. I figured that I could try to take it in from the middle. Also, I ditched the long sleeves. This is all part of my effort to take a big dress and make less of it. This also included taking about 4" off the bottom.
It was still kind of big, but of course I had to wear it before it was too hot for rayon. That's why the wide belt is here.

 Creative pose + filter = nice picture. They're so heavily edited because they were taken at night using flash and on an older camera.

Look, it has pockets. I wish you could see the little circular floral things that make up the print.

Bodice closeup. I actually decided to take it in from the back after these pics. Size 4, my ass.

Coming soon!
Other dresses with unflattering styles but great '80s prints!

And this hit from the 1990s!