Pimp My Dress #1

I altered this dress for my birthday. I found it for $3 at an op-shop called the Good Samaritan. It is one of my favourites, as they have a $2 costume bin I dive into every time I am in the store. Costumes....more like every day casual wear! Also, the dress did not have a tag, and the woman asked "Is three dollars o.k....?" 

While it fitted well from the waist down, it was obviously sewn for someone with a smaller rib cage and breasts. I do not have any photos of me wearing the dress in this state, but imagine 10kg of potatoes in a 5kg bag. That is what I looked like in this dress.

So, then it was time to unpick the seams on either side of the back zipper, and attach two lace inserts. There was a little bit of lace left over from some other thing, so I measured two isosceles triangles and sewed them into the space where the seams were. It's hard to see, but I added approximately 10cm to the bust by doing that. I hand-sew everything, and looking closely you can see a pattern of Xs along the lace and down to the start of the tulle of the skirt. I did that because I thought running stitch would be boring, and I didn't have any thread in Insipid Pink.

Lace inserts and stitchery

So, then it was time to alter the bottom. Using lengths of tulle approximately 15cm wide by 1.5m long I made concertina folds 5cm long to add more volume to the bottom of the dress and sewed those firmly to the hemline.

From a distance

Front view

Back view

For the most part then I was done. I thought the uninterrupted pink material of the bodice was unflattering to my skin tone, so I sewed a length of lace around the top of the bodice, to break it up visually.

Finished dress modelled by the ever patient Puzzletits

Back view

Back detail

Lastly, there were a few rips in the pink tulle I needed to patch up. When you wear only secondhand stuff, mending is a permanent fixture of the landscape and finding a balance was hard with the tulle. How to mend the rips without destroying the delicacy of light pink mesh? Make it part of the detail of the skirt! I used a special swirly stitch* to make it look like everything I did was on purpose. Which it totally was.

Bam.

So, there is my birthday dress. 100% secondhand and reused material, maybe...20 hours work altogether? Worth it.

*button stitch, or blanket stitch, if you want to be precise.