Blue dress mending

 Do you ever have a project that you know you should just walk away from...but you keep carrying on anyway? I wrote a while back about my most recent Staple Dress and how the fabric just failed and shredded after only one wear:

Yeah I admit that is was over a stress point and that realistically I needed to add a bit more ease to the pattern in the bust/shoulders area (due to a gradual recent weight gain)...still...most fabrics will only shred like this after several wears and washes. Unless the fabric itself is quite weak to begin with. Rayon does have this stigma associated with it and up until now I had never really encountered it. 
I don't know if its really typical itself of rayon or a sign of shoddy workmanship in fabric construction or mishandling on my part but I was still pretty devastated when this happened. This dress fabric pretty much felt like heaven to wear, cool and soft and BREATHABLE on a really hot Western Australian summers day. A lovely print featuring my favourite shade of blue and with just the right amount of drape. I was in love.
So I decided to give machine mending a bit of a go. Basically you do a straight stitch back and forth, trying to blend in with the direction of the weave and changing thread colour (if needed) to suit the pattern.
A bit uneven along the leaf edges, but otherwise I was pretty happy with my efforts:

I reinforced the fabric with some light iron-on interfacing, which you can see on the reverse side: 

After doing this I thought I had saved the dress from the bin but no sooner had I worn the item again that the fabric shredded in a different spot :(
In the end I hacked the top off above the shirring and turned the dress into a skirt. As the skirt is a lot looser I'm thinking the fabric should hold together OK. 
All the leftover bits of this fabric (quite a bit) went to my kids school for kindy kids to cut up and use in craft- I wasn't going to risk getting sucked into making something with this again, only to have it fall apart.
Learning, learning, still learning..... ;)

Have a good one!

Kate x