Pages

Thursday, October 26, 2017

Tailoring - Quickest way to Tailor a Dress with a Side Zipper

Facebook has been showing me these seasonal dresses in my news feed lately.

And I love them.



They are so cute!


And so me!

Except one thing: I work for my church and even though most people have fun at Halloween, there are some people that don't particularly like jack-o-lanterns, ghosts, and witches. I am not one to go out of my way to offend people, so I just looked at them wistfully and thought I'd move on. . .



Until I saw this dress!

I mean. . .God made bats, right?

So I ordered it.



Only one problem, though. The smallest size they offered was XL. So. . .




It was way too big.



So. . .normally when I take a dress in, I go for the ol' side seam. However. . .



This dress has a side zipper.

There are two ways to fix this situation. The first one involves taking the zipper out, taking the dress in, and then putting the zipper back in.



No thank you. So. . .I did the second option: Take the already existing darts in even further!

Here you can see the dress--inside out--with the front darts pinned.




I pinched the darts up until I got to a "fading point." I put pins at that point.



Notice: I ONLY pinned the bodice. I left the skirt part alone.



I did the same to the back.




So here is the dress inside out and pinned.



Darts are annoying because you usually just have to sew from the bottom pin and eyeball your way up to the top pin. There is a really fool proof way to make sure that your darts are the same dimension. If you have a French curve and a chalk pencil, you can replicate the same shape on each dart. If you don't have a French curve, you can use a ruler in a pinch. . .but a French curve is better because your body is curved, whereas a ruler is straight. (If you don't have a tailor's pencil, use a regular pencil. It's on the wrong side of the fabric. Who's to know.) 




Then, all you have to do is sew along the line. Easy!



The finished dress. I didn't bother darting the skirt because it looks just as good without the darting, so why do more work?




Add a crinoline and you're done!



The End!











No comments:

Post a Comment