While there are grocery stores in Taipei that are more the western norm, many people tend to get their groceries in neighborhood street markets. The stalls are set up along a smaller road or alley (sometimes cars will brave the pedestrian crowd and still drive down the street - difference from the US, I feel like, because here we'd more likely see streets closed if there is a pedestrian-heavy event happening).
In addition to groceries, there are also traveling vendors that sell a variety of wares - kitchen and home goods, clothes, toys, etc. Since the vendors travel market to market, you see a different mix of vendors each day.
At one particular clothes vendor, they had a big table with a heap of girls' clothes that basically amounted to a rummage sale. Everything on the table was $100 Taiwanese dollars (it may have even been $50 Taiwanese dollars, I forget), which comes out to about $3 USD. Most of the clothes are in pretty good condition, but there are also items that have some slight damage, so it's basically buyer beware, because all sales are final).
We found a white tulle dress for Evie that had a couple of small rips in it that I thought to myself, I can fix this! It then sat in my laundry room ever since we returned, but I finally had a chance to fix it over the holidays after picking up some trim at JoAnn.
There were two things I needed to fix - (1) the torn satin trim and (2) a hole in the tulle with some discoloration:
I used a seam ripper to remove the torn satin trim at the bottom of the dress. I also trimmed out a bit more around the hole to get rid of some discolored spots that didn't come out with a wash. I replaced the satin trim at the bottom of the dress with grosgrain ribbon, and also picked out some fancier trim to add a strip around the dress to cover up the hole.
My sewing's not perfect, but all in all, I think the dress turned out great and I'm happy with my handiwork. The shade of white on the grosgrain ribbon is brighter than the rest of the dress, but I can get over that!
