I’m a fairly scrawny gal, so it’s rare that I encounter this problem.
This dress is too small. See how it puckers out at my hips? Not attractive. I could practically hear the seams groaning in protest. It fit perfectly up top (my usual problem with dresses), though. I liked the lines of the dress, and was sad that I would have to change the whole thing drastically to make it work. I couldn’t take the skirt out any, as there was no seam allowance. Grrrrrr!
I was going to have to make this lovely dress into a top. My original plan was to turn it into a tunic, so I could at least keep the pockets.
First, I removed these bits of stuffy frumpiness.
Then, I cut off some of the length.
I ripped the seams up the sides of the dress with my trusty seam ripper.
At this point, I tried my tunic on and hated it. Absolutely hated it. You could tell that I had simply slit the seams because it didn’t fit around my hips. I temporarily abandoned the project.
The next morning, I felt refreshed and knew what I needed to do to save this! It needed to be shorter, meaning that I would have to give up the pockets in order to save the garment…a noble sacrifice!
Now, I just needed to finish the raw edges.
I took the seams on the sides and turned them under twice to keep them from fraying, and pinned them.
Then, under the needle they went!
Don’t worry, folks! It’s not that kind of needle!
The last thing I needed to do was finish up my twice-shortened hem at the bottom. This involved a bit more pinning…
And a quick run through my machine. I pressed my new hems/seams and was all done! As the dress closed via a zipper that ran all the way down the front, I just left it unzipped a little. I added the sash from another dress, and ready to go to work!
I’m not gonna lie. I wasn’t thrilled about this one. And here’s why:
The sides were just too gap-y and weird. I’m really not the kind of gal who wants to showcase her muffin top (My muffin top is all that…whole-grain and low-fat!), and I thought the end result looked a bit clumsy. What do you think? Any ideas of other directions I could have taken with this dress?
Cheers!
