Navy Submarine Ball

Mike and I attended our first Ball last Saturday.  It commemorated the 111th birthday of the Navy Submarine force.  It was pretty neat, with a dinner, speaker, recognition of retired subs and even a few WWII Navy Veterans.  We had a great time, and it was a lot of fun (and stress) to prepare for :)  Going dress shopping, since I didn't own a single dress that could be counted as formal, was fun but nearly unfruitful.  There was not a single modest dress to be found.  Upon resolving to alter any dress I found, the search continued and I finally settled on this pretty purple one.

 In greater detail

 So, the work began.  I removed the bottom ruffle of the dress and re-hemmed the bottom.
Then, I cut sections of that ruffle and sewed them in as sleeves to the dress!  The last bit to finish was HAND-sewing the piece of material to go over the low v-neck.  That took a long time.  All in all, through my mistakes and experiments to figure out how to get all of this done, I spent about 4 hours altering this dress, all in one day.  I was pretty sick of looking at it by the time I finished :) But, I am very pleased with the outcome.

 Here we are, all dressed up. Mike in his dress whites and me in my new formal dress.  We had a great time.

 I even got to do my hair all fancy.  Wow, it had been a while since I had tried to do anything like this!  And I had about 1 option that I knew how to do as an up-do, so here it is.

 I liked it.  Dressing up was a lot of fun!  I look forward to the future Balls and events when we will get to do this again.  Look, I even got some jewelry(!!), considering I didn't have ANY to wear.