Refashioning: Updating and Deleting a Weird Hem-Line Stripe Trend

Remember this stripe trend from the 90s? It was that sort of nautical thing that Tommy Hilfiger made so popular. (This dress is Liz Claiborne if that tells you anything.) Anyways, I found this dress at Goodwill, and I really liked the thicker stripes, but those narrow ones at the bottom hem just looked really dated to me. Also, the length of the dress was about four inches below the knee--not a good length for me.

So, this is what I did to fix it.

I folded the unwanted striped area in half and pinned it.

This is a close up of the pinning. See how I pinned right along the black part?

This is the pin from the other side. I tried to make sure that all my pins followed along the black line on either side of the fold.

Here is a series of the said pins all along the black stripe that I wanted to keep.

As I sewed, I kept just to the left of the pins to make sure that none of the white peeked through on either side.

After sewing, I ironed the fold up.

And then I top-stitched the fold to keep everything from shifting underneath.

Here you can see my sewing and top-stitching from the back.

Then I cut off the excess of the fold.

( I realize that I could have just cut off the entire bottom hem of the dress and created a new hem, but this way I could keep the actual manufacturer's hem. Plus, I didn't want the dress to be too short. Plus, I liked the big, thick black stripe.)

And here is my completed dress! And you'd be none the wiser if I hadn't told you!

To me, it looks a lot more timeless now.

The End!