The Confident Journal: Two Skater Dresses

It has come to my attention that a former student of mine enjoys reading these posts, so. . .a shout out to you, Lindsey! I miss you! A little bird told me your freshman year went well. . .(That little bird is your mother. I literally almost ran into her at Walmart. Literally.)

Speaking of Walmart, I found this neon yellow sporty jersey fabric at Walmart for $1.50 a yard and so I bought four yards.

I had no idea what to do with it, so I thought I would start with a skater dress. I did my "lay another dress on top and cut around it" pattern system that I've been using lately. It's really easy, Guys. Way easier than paper patterns that you have to pin. You should try it.

Maybe this picture will show you how easy it is. You just have to make sure you cut a seam allowance around whatever you cut. You can see here that I extended the torso down a few inches from the original dress. That's because I don't like when waists are just a tiny bit too high.

The piece I cut up there was the back piece with a higher collar. Here is how I cut the front. I used the cut piece as my pattern.

Then, I just cut around it.

But I stopped at the collar.

Then I replaced the original dress on top the piece I was cutting just now.

I tucked the back collar part in. . .

and cut around the front collar.

To cut the skirt part, I just folded the bodice half of the dress in and laid the skirt part on top of my yellow fabric like this.

Then, I cut around it. You can play with these measurements, you know. For instance, I made the skirt 1/2 an inch longer.

When it came to sewing, I had to choose which side of the fabric I wanted to be the good side. This is athletic fabric, so usually this is the side that shows:

But that was a little too much texture for me and found that the back side was actually more solid.

Skipping ahead. I sewed the dress together but when it came to hemming, I hemmed the front middle bottom hem up 1/2" more than the hem I did the rest of the way around. This allowed for "butt lift." If you don't know what I'm talking about, skip it. I just hate when dress hems hang just a tiny bit higher in the back. Drives me nuts.

Here is a closer picture to show what I'm talking about. I trimmed that edge after taking this picture, just so you know.

The end! All in all this dress only took 1-2 hours. I wasn't really paying attention.

Okay, I know this hem is kinda tacky. Usually, you are supposed to double fold before you hem, do a lining, or use bias tape, but I didn't do any of that for two reasons: (1) If I double folded the collar and sleeves which are curved, then they would have bunched up funny. (2) The only reason to double fold, lining, or bias tape is because you are afraid of the fabric fraying. Since this fabric doesn't fray, I didn't worry about it. You can't tell from the outside and that's the only side that matters. Back in the day when women only had like five dresses, it mattered. Nowadays when most women have tens if not hundreds of dresses, there is no reason to make them last through an apocalypse.

Okay, that dress went so fast that I decided to make another dress with fabric I already had. Before I sewed the yellow dress together, I traced the pieces onto paper. Then I drew a raglan line from the collar bone to the arm pit and cut the pattern along that line. That's what I used to make this raglan skater dress:

I saw a dress on eBay where the raglan line didn't end directly at the armpit, but rather ended just below it. I thought that was unusual, so I did the same thing.