Wannabe Wednesday: Fractured Floral Edition

When I saw this dress by Juicy Couture, I was in love!

That'll be $139 of love. — That’ll be $139 of love.

As you can probably guess, this story doesn’t end with me clicking on “add to cart” and waiting for it to arrive in the mail. Oh no, friend. I haven’t spent $139 on a dress in years, and I’m not about to start now!

Luckily, I had this dress I found for $1 with some ganked-up interfacing coming out everywhere! 🙂

I'm a lucky gal. I promise. — I’m a lucky gal. I promise.

It’s patterned and blue! And it’s about to have much more in common with that inspiration dress! 🙂

To get started, I hacked off the collar and shortened the sleeves.

Now. I knew I would need to take this dress in, but I also needed to get the shape of the top of the dress looking something like the end result before I did so (make sense?). Soooo…I made a couple of cuts!

I pinned it on my dress form and used safety pins to make a v-neck and pinned the shoulders together.

Okay...now we're getting the basic idear. — Okay…now we’re getting the basic idear.

NOW I’m ready to start reshaping! I put the dress on my form inside-out and took the sides in, trying not to make the top too fitted. I wanted it to be a little free like the Juicy version. 🙂

Each side went under the needle…

I snipped off the excess fabric and put my dress back on the form. It was time to get the neckline/sleeves pinned and prepped for sewing!

I stitched all these raw edges down for the front and the back!

I’m so close to being done here, folks! I stitched the bottom parts of the sleeve slits together…

…then I made a couple of straps from the leftover scraps!

Use the pin to turn the tube inside-out! :) — Use the pin to turn the tube inside-out! 🙂

I pinned my new straps to the shoulders of my dress and stitched them down.

With my straps in place, I could finally tell just how much of that bottom hem to hack off!

And now I have my own Jilly Couture Fractured & Not Quite Floral Dress! 🙂 I used the hemmed bottom scrap to cinch the waist a bit (although it really wasn’t necessary). 🙂