Happy Birthday to meeeeeeeeeee! I needed a lovely little dress to celebrate my 29th birthday in. I chose this little numba!

This dress wasn’t very festive in its original state. I loved the print, but the rest of it was rather blah. Let the change begin! First, I chopped off the top part.

Then, I pinned the top of my new dress under.

Then I ran the top of the dress through my sewing machine, leaving about an inch of room at the top. This would be a casing for an 1/2″ elastic strip. I also left about 1/2″ unstitched, so I could thread the elastic through.

I cut out a length of elastic that fit snugly, but not too snugly under my arms and safety-pinned one end.

I worked the saftey-pinned elastic into its casing.

I sewed the ends of the elastic together, and closed up my gap as well.
My new dress stayed up perfectly with its new elastic top, but I wasn’t done! To make it birthday-awesome, I grabbed a scrap of fabric from a previous refashion. I pinned the edges together.

Next, I sewed it up and turned it inside out. I sliced my strip into two even strips, and sewed in the raw edges. I was almost done! To finish my sweet new frock, I sewed the two straps to the front of the dress. Hello halter dress!
My “birthday suit” was ready!

I was quite happy with this dress! As it was chilly outside, I threw on one of my favorite cardis.

After work, I met up with my buds to celebrate! 🙂




Cheers!
I don’t know if you get comments from this far back, but I have been reading your blog from newest to oldest. I love so many of the things you’ve done. I have my sewing machine sitting in my living room and a big stack of things to work on. Not quite there yet, but thanks to your inspiration, I’ve dyed many things in the last couple of weeks. I’ve made faded jeans look new and changed the color of a couple of one of my kiddo’s t-shirts that I hated. All that to say – the refashion on this dress was cute, but I thought that the cardigan pulled it all together – loved the yellow with the yellow flowers!!
Thanks so much for travelling back in time to leave this nice comment! 🙂 I’m so sad…my old roomate ended up washing this cardigan with a sharpie and ruined it. :/
Happy birthday, I lovvvvvve the way the dress turned out!!
Happy Berfday! Dress is amazingly cuter. Normally I can guess where you’re going with a restyle, but this one is supah unique and cute. Great job!