The Long and Short of It

Hello Readers. Today's post is about two long dresses and one short woman. I'm not sure if the dresses were really that long, they just seemed really long on me. Most long dresses are much too long on me. I didn't own a maxi dress until I was given this white dress. It fit my daughter perfectly, but she is 8 inches taller than me. I guess that is how much I would need to grow to fit standard off the rack clothes. I am 45 so I am not going to get any taller. I foresee a lifetime of alterations.

This dress is way too long as you can see from the puddle on the floor around me. Because you can't see my feet I look even shorter than normal. I am holding the straps in this weird way because the straps are too long. This happens to me a lot too. The neckline is too low and the shoulders need to be altered. Knit tanks are so easy to fix. Read on and I will show you my quick cheat method.

First, I decided how much shorter the dress needed to be. I turned the dress inside-out and stitched the front and back of the strap together. This made the strap shorter and I just cut off the excess. The fabric is a stretch knit so it won't fray at all. It only takes a few minutes and no one ever sees the raw edges inside. ("Nobody sees, nobody knows". -Hoodwincked)

You can see how much excess I removed in the picture below. This works great for summer tank tops. Now that the top of the dress is pulled up from the top it is a bit shorter. I can shorten the bottom of the dress. If I had shortened the bottom of the dress first, it would have been gotten shorter when I fixed the straps. 

The next thing I did was shorten the length from the bottom hem.Here is a look at how much I cut off the bottom of the dress. The clingy material was difficult to spread out on the floor. It looks like I cut it on a diagonal. It is straight, I promise. 

Here is the second piece of today's post. This long denim dress is a little dated and a little boring. It is also too long on me. I could shorten it, but I had another idea. 

I decided to cut off the top of the dress and wear it like a vest. I cut just below the horizontal seam and ran it through the wash so it would have a little bit of a frayed edge along the bottom. (I love cut-off denim.)

Well, here we are. I am never going to be tall but I don't look as short as I did when you couldn't see my feet at all and I was in a puddle of fabric. I kept the white dress at ankle length. This is a great dress for hot weather.

Thanks for reading, now go make something fun for yourself.