Campbell's Soup Dress Tutorial

Every year the Seattle Art Museum staff has an event to celebrate their Docent volunteers.  This holiday luncheon is always fun to attend with a lovely lunch, festive entertainment and a raffle. 

The theme this year was Andy Warhol's Factory, in celebration of the exhibit Pop Departures  currently at SAM. 

Everyone was encouraged to dress in period outfits, so I decided to make a Campbell's mushroom soup dress for the occasion. 

Below is the tutorial in case you'd like to make your own!

I started with three pieces of clothing to come up with my one outfit.  I found the red sleeveless dress, red jacket and white dress all at my local thrift store.  I took a photo of the pricetags because I thought it was very funny that the more material equals less expensive.  As you can see, the dress was $4.99, the jacket was $6.99 and the white lingerie was $8.80. I was able to make the new dress for a little over $20.

First I had to get rid of the ruffle that went all the way down the red dress, you can see a little of it here.

However, while trying to cut it out, I made a nice hole in the red dress. Learn from my mistake: be careful with your seam ripper, as sometimes they have a mind of their own!

I then took out the top part of my white dress you can see one photo up.  Don't forget: I was making a 70s dress and wearing bras on the outside of an outfit wasn't made popular till Madonna in the 80s.

You'll need to excuse the shameless plug of my hand's cool henna design I got on Saturday at Redmond Lights. Pretty, huh?

I wanted to sew the red jacket to the sleeveless dress because the luncheon was going to be held at the Seattle Asian Art Museum Board Room, which I am always cold in.  It doesn't matter that it's December, I'm cold in the summer months too.  I blame my Mediterranean blood.  So I went ahead and sewed the sleeves of the jacket into the sleeves of the dress so I wouldn't have to keep tugging on the jacket at the event. We all hate that, right?

I was finally able to put down the dresses and get to work on the letters.  First I printed out the word S O U P in very large boring font.  I cut out the letters from the paper, from mushroom fabric (in yellow!), and from a stiff stabilizer so my letters won't fold on themselves.

After I cut out the S O U P letters, I printed out the word Campbell's and made sure it was the correct size to fit on the dress. I cut out word from red felt. I'm not sure why the logo didn't print the apostrophe after the last L, so my proper English friends will have to excuse this little error.  I only noticed after my dress was done and the cursed machine had been put away.

Now the fun part!  All that applique sewing that feels never endinng!  First the word Campbell.

Then the yellow letters.  Check out the mushroom soup design on the fabric.  Isn't it the cutest? You'll have to excuse the uneven edges of the sewing.  The last few steps of this dress were done later in the evening when my threshold for perfection had long peeked.

Once all the applique was done, I found a round lid that I put in between the two words and lightly drew out a circle with a pencil.  I painted the circle yellow with fabric paint.

As a final touch, I added a silver ribbon I had in a drawer to the bottom of the dress to replicate the edge of the metal can.  It was the perfect pièce de résistance.

 

It was great fun to show off to all my friends. There were so many other women that got into the spirit of the party and dressed up also. 

During the event, the staff hired an Elvis impersonator that serenated us, and I won the raffle of a beautiful Chihuly coffee table book.  All the docents got a gorgeous book on the art in the Wright collection and I managed to leave with one of the table centerpieces. The adorable metal leaves were a wonderful surprise to discover when I got home.

Thanks SAM staff for a wonderful afternoon!