How To Raise The Elastic Waist Of A Dress

Here’s a dress that’s been in my Refashion stash for a few months.

refashionista how to raise elastic waist of dress before — What to do with you???

When I first beheld this ’80s frock, I was pretty stumped.

I liked the print and those slightly puffy sleeves are really trendy right now, so I felt like I could make them work.

But I couldn’t decide whether to turn it into a top, or somehow figure out a way to keep it as a dress.

After much thought, I figured out what wasn’t working for this dress. The fit is actually fine, but that waistline falls at a really frumpy place that isn’t helped by the awkward length of the skirt.

Jerell's Sweetheart label — Exactly who is this “Jerrell”?

Anybody else just love vintage clothing brand names/labels????

This season, I’m seeing a trend of dresses with slightly high waists.

They don’t fall quite at one’s natural waist, but they aren’t quite empire waists either. Do a Google image search of Fall 2020 dress trends to see what I mean.

That’s the direction I decided to go in with my $1 thrifted dress.

But how does one (easily) raise the elastic waist on a dress????

Time was of the essence, as I had to hurry and get ready for a fancy wine dinner with Mr. Refashionista that evening. I had no time for hemming and hawing (except for the quite literal hemming I would eventually perform on this dress).

First off, I pinned the top of my dress where I wanted the waist to be.

pinning desired location of new waist — Right here!

Then, I cut the dress in two!

To make this step easier (since the fabric was all bunched up from the elastic), I stretched out the elastic waistband and pinned it to my ironing board first.

stretched out dress pinned to ironing board — Just a pin on each end!

This made it easy to get two nice straight cuts.

cutting top of dress with pinking shears — I used pinking shears to fight frayage!

I trimmed the area above the skirt elastic to .5″ and discarded the leftover scrap.

Now to bring it all back together!

The main challenge in reattaching the skirt to the top of this dress was the fact that the existing elastic gathers the fabric (duh), making it tricking to work with.

I could have just cut off the elastic, reattached the two pieces together and then added a new elastic waist.

But I’ve got a MUCH easier way!

I scrounged around the house until I found an object (a cardboard box) that would stretch out the waistband elastic enough to make pinning the top back on evenly easy.

using box to stretch waist and pin top back on to skirt — Thanks to Mr. Refashionista for his Amazon Prime addiction!

I pinned the two pieces together by tucking the skirt into the top with right sides facing each other.

skirt and top pinned together — Here’s what it looked like when I was all done!

Then, I stitched the pieces together on my machine, pulling the elastic taut as I went.

sewing waist on dress — Make sure to stitch riiiiiight above the elastic!

But what about that hem?

I marked where I wanted my new hem to be and made a chop!

cutting fabric from bottom of skirt — Chop!

Then, I folded the bottom of the dress under twice, pinning as I went.

pinning hem for dress — Measure as ya go!

I’m sure some of you are questioning my judgment for removing so much of that interesting contrasting print from the skirt of this dress, but I thought it would look better with just a little bit of that print, since it’s already so prominent on the top of the dress.