So, for this fashion reconstruction project, I chose a bright orange (with equally bold floral motifs) two-piece traditional Malay dress or baju kurung pesak gantung, a variant to the baju kurung pesak where the pesak starts a few centimetres below the armholes, thus creating the gantung or hang effect.
It was purchased from my usual flea market, back in 2017 which cost me $5.
The fabric for this baju kurung is silk-like and came already embellished with ironed-on stones and glitters that caught my eyes, the main reason I bought it.
But regret came only when I realised that there were snags on the skirt and the ends of the fabric fray really badly after I have ripped off all the seams and removed the serged ends.
This literally proved that "all that glitters is not gold".
Anyway, I have been meaning to work on this dress but never really settled on any particular design until now.
So, for this project, I opted for a more casual design i.e. a kaftan or baju kelawar but one which I have yet to see in boutiques or stores.
The concept seemed easy to execute ~ based on what I have seen from the web, making a kaftan is the easiest.
To create a full length kaftan with long sleeves, I had to add extra fabric for the "wings" of the kaftan since I could not salvage all of the existing fabric due to the abovementioned state it was in.
And because of that, it turned out to be even more tedious than I thought because my next regret came when I realised that I have picked the wrong combination of fabrics for a kaftan ~ one that frays badly and another that snags easily. OMG!
A new take on this project is to never again buy a dress that has glitters embedded (ironed-on) because these will interfere with the sergering and sewing, which can be a real nuisance.
For the first time during the lifespan of the serger machine, I broke the needle, all thanks to the embedded glitters, and now the serger machine performs much better than before!
Another mistake I made was to work on the neckline after I had finished working with the bodice.
I think I have never spent more time sewing (by hand and machine) on any of the previous dresses than I have on this one because it involved not only French seams but also fusible interfacing, bias binding, pleated frills and to top it off, I embellished the neckline with beads. Talk about being OTT!
After three weeks of endlessness, the day of rejoicing came, eventually. And the end result is beyond my expectations, really!
Here's what I meant...
At a glance, this new dress looks like a new variant of the baju kurung pesak, that is yet to make its debut into the market place. If it was truly a two-piece baju kurung, then I would call it my baju kurung pesak payung. hehehe
But since it is, after all, a full length dress, I am calling it my baju kelawung instead.
Who could tell that this was a cut-and-paste project, if I had not disclosed the facts?
I can proudly say that you cannot find this item anywhere. 💃🐒👌🙋
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