A first for me…

Hello! Today I have another alteration to share with you…my first (successful) attempt at taking in a dress!

The subject? This very pouffy, large, dress. You can probably tell from the picture that it doesn’t have any particular shape, and it’s about four sizes too big for me. It had been hanging out in my to-be-altered pile until I picked it up a few days ago and decided to actually tackle the problem of making it a wearable outfit.

I began by measuring myself and the width of the dress at the places I would be taking it in. (Full disclosure: I did look up how to take in a dress just to find out the gist of it, but most of this is what I came up with myself.) The little plastic clip in the photo above shows where the waist had to be taken in on the dress. The line of pins above that is where I marked it to take in the dress. I actually had to take out my initial line that I had already sewn and make it bigger by a few inches, since I miscalculated a little bit. 😉

Here’s a finished side. You can see the plastic clip that used to mark where the chest needed to be taken in.

After I measured, pinned, and sewed both sides, I tried on the dress. It looked good, so I cut off the excess material and finished the edges with the sewing machine. I probably should have serged the edges, but our machine is broken. Even as it was, I was just hoping the sewing machine wouldn’t conk out on me mid-stitch. 😉

This is the finished product. For my first time doing this, I thought it turned out pretty well! You can see the definition I added to the dress. It just kind of looked like a sack before… 😉

And here it is in an outfit! It might look a little too dark for Spring, but I think that the bright design balances it out. As you could see in the pictures above, the dress is sleeveless, so I paired it with my new black shrug. It’s actually still pretty modest without the shrug, but I just feel more comfortable wearing it. Another plus of the colorful paisley design is that most of my other shrugs and sweaters will match it, too!

All-in-all, I found that taking in a dress is a moderately simple endeavor, and it ends (hopefully) with you having a perfectly tailored piece of clothing. I’d call that a success! 🙂

I hope this post has been helpful to you! See you later ~ Emily