Restyled Dress

These photos are terrible, I had no 'photographer' on hand this day so I had to work out how to use the auto timer function on my camera.  I struggled working out how to get my whole body in the photo without it blurring, but I think you get should get the drift of the style of this dress from these 2 photos.

  I've seen this style being worn by other people and thought it was quite nice, but it really doesn't seem to suit me, so I decided some minor tweaking was in order to create a dress I would actually wear.

Firstly I chopped off these ribbon thingy's, just because I find them annoying.

I wanted to shorten this second layer bit, as the back was longer than the front and I wanted them to be the same length.  So I drew a chalk line as a guide for where I should cut it.

The first bit I cut off didn't even out the length of the front and back, so I ended up chopping off a little bit extra.

Because the original shape of this dress really didn't suit me, my plan was to add elastic to the bottom of the upper 'layer' of the dress to create some shape.  So I sewed a 'casing' on the bottom edge of this upper layer.

After I had sewn the casing, I threaded through some elastic using a 'bodkin' which is a nifty little do-dacky that makes threading elastic really easy.

Then I sewed the ends of the elastic together.

The other part of this dresses style that I thought looked terrible on me was the length of the skirt.  I decided I wanted this dress to sit just below my knees, so I measured and cut off about 6cm of length (the off cuts will be used in my next project).  

And because I am impatient and didn't want to pin or iron the hem before sewing it I just whizzed it through the machine and hoped for the best.

The hem worked out just fine.

With the weather finally hinting at cooler temperatures I was able wear boots and a cardigan.

I even managed a photo outside.

Dress: Thrifted $4, Boots: Dr Marten Wedge Calf Boots used from eBay $120, Cardigan: old wardrobe item from Tree of Life, Accessories: Old wardrobe items.