An Overdyed Floral Halter Dress DIY Refashion

Yep. That title has a lot going on, doesn’t it? Don’t worry! It’ll all make sense very soon!

When I scored this dress for $1 at the thrift store, I originally thought I’d probably leave it as-is.

That was, until I tried it on.

I’m actually fairly narrow-shouldered, but somehow this dress was uncomfortably snug in the sleeves (Must be all the glasses of wine I’ve been lifting as of late).

Also, upon closer investigation, I saw it was really faded as well.

However, the fabric was really comfy, and I had an idea of how to fix those sleeves!

But first, a dye bath!

I checked the label of my new dress, and saw it was a cotton/poly blend.

The cotton will dye nicely. The polyester will not. This is totally fine by me, as all I’m trying to do is give it enough of a color refresh to hide that fading.

I chose some fuchsia dye. My thought process was, Yellow + Fuchsia = Some kind of Orange.

I prepped my dye bath.

Once again, I’m not going for a suuuuper saturated color here, so I only used about half the bottle (Dye is kind of pricey, so I like to stretch it out!).

I added my dress to its warm bath.

I let it sit in its bath, stirring it periodically for thirty minutes.

Then I tossed it in my washing machine to rinse and dried it.

Time to refashion this dress into a halter dress!

I put my dress on and pinned it at my armpit where I wanted my halter dress arm hole to be (allowing for a small seam allowance).

Then, I chopped off a sleeve!

Then, I layered the cut-off sleeve on the other side for a template and cut it off as well! this ensures both sides will be even Steven.

I folded the arm holes under once and pinned them down.

And under the needle they went!

You can see I kept the same green thread in my machine from my last refashion because I was feeling lazy thought it complemented the green in the flowers nicely.

After a quick press, I was all done!

Can we talk about how fantastic that color turned out for a second? I absolutely love dyeing over floral fabrics as they always look so much more interesting afterwards.

My arms and I love the new halter top too!

Do you have any dresses in your closet you think might enjoy a similar refashion? Why not give it a try?

Cheers!