Dress Redo

Over spring break the past week, I did a little thrifting with my lovely friend Haliee! Can I just say, I used to hate thrift stores so much! I didn't like the smell and thought everything in the stores was ugly. I wish I could go back and tell myself otherwise! Now I can't stay away from them, and I am debating shopping almost exclusively at thrift stores...

Here are my reasons why: 

1)There are a lot of issues with the textile industry regarding labor issues and the bad treatment of workers that I really don't want to keep supporting.

 2) I am a college student and therefore have no money. 

3) It forces me to be creative and then I also have crafty things to do! 

So here's a dress I got from Goodwill, 

Just kidding it actually looked like this..

Nice shape huh?? No. But I loved the pattern and the color, and there was plenty of fabric to play around with!

(Sorry for the blurry picture! I was too excited to start sewing!!)

To start I pinned the hem if the dress up, because I knew I definitely wanted to change that.

Sometimes it is easier to do this while wearing the dress, and you get a better estimate of the length outcome! (I had to redo this step a few times because I pinned it way to short the first time)

This is when it was too short!

FINNALYYYYYYY I got the hem where I wanted it and cut off the extra, which I saved to make the belt later!

I waited to sew this till the end, so I could take on the back and make that seam lay down nicely. 

This dress had gathering on the front and back, so to take in the back I used my seam ripper to undo the stitching like the picture above.

Here is the back after the stitching is all out.

The gathering added a lot of fabric to the back, so I just sectioned some out from the middle, 

pinned it, and cut off that triangle scrap of fabric.

Next I sewed the back of the dress together again and the hem. (The hem I just sewed around what I had pinned and cut off the extra few inches that I had not cut off earlier).

This part just kinda happened, I cut some of the fabric in the back to make a cut out then sewed it to finish the dress. I probably didn't need to do this step, it adds some extra work. I just kinda followed my heart on this, and I love it!

This is the hem I cut off earlier. To make this into a belt I undid the hand stitching of the original hem, cut the lighter colored fabric on the picture above so that I could fold it under the darker and sewed up again!

 

And here's my end product:

Hope to do more dress redo projects soon! 

Love Becca