Italian day again, new dress. Fixing your colours.

My daughter's Italian day dress got ruined when I washed it. Yes, it was me. However, I hadn't expected the fabric not to be colourfast. According to the lady in Spotlight, none of the fabric they sell is! So, what do you do? According to most sources, brine (salt water) is the way to get the colour to stay in the fabric. I also read that if the fabric is silk vinegar is more appropriate. For some reason, I started getting cravings for fish and chips when reading about this.

So, carefully selected some red and some green drill then started the tests. Cut off a little red and dropped it into some water. Yes, the colour started haemorrhaging instantly. The green just as bad. Couple of litres of water and about 1/2 a cup of salt and lowered all of the red into it. A couple of hours later rinsed it and not much came out! Great stuff. Emptied it and repeated with the green.

So, with Simplicity 5945 (view 1), I simply replaced the side panels with a green on one side and a red on the other.

It was easy to make this and only took half a day to get this far:

Didn't have to ask for help either. Love it when this happens. Means I'm learning something or the pattern was ridiculously simple. Well, bit of both perhaps.
Here is the final  dress, modelled by the girl:

Same as the other one except for hemming and the bow.
The hemming was done on a Singer 319K I picked up free of charge two weeks ago. It was seized but a full weekend later and it's really very smooth and beautiful. Had to re-do the wiring too. Would have done the whole dress on this machine except a few days ago I won a 1960 401a on eBay for $13.45, also not working. Funny how easy it is to get these things working and it was hard to select one for this job, seeing as both were seemingly perfectly suited. The 401a got the most work done but when I tried blind hemming it, I needed instructions. The 320K2 manual is the only one I had at hand, so grabbed it. They were specifically for the 320/319 so I grabbed the 319 and got to work. I have to say, Singer designed some amazing machines in the late 1950s. Both of these machines were made around the same time, and they're both smooth and almost faultless. If I were making or hemming jeans, though, I'd go for a 201 or my 96K. The small motors aren't really up to it.