Refashion Methods

Hello Readers. I love refashioning clothes. When I am deciding if I want to refashion something, I look at the garment. I start by looking at the fabric it is made of. Is it nice material? If it is really of low quality, there is no reason to spend time on it. Is it in good condition? Some damage just can't be repaired. And mysterious stains are just gross. No thanks! Is the material going to be easy to work with? Some material is just so difficult, I don't even try it. (Chiffon, I am talking about you.)

This black floral dress was pretty and it was made of very nice material. I really liked it, but it was too big and a little too long.  It looked shapeless and it gaped under the arms.

This dress had a zipper in the back so I could work on the sides without messing up the dress. I took both sides of the dress in a little bit. This made it fit much better. It closed the armholes so they fit too. 

I saw a post online recently about using a stapler to fit the sides of piece of clothing while you are wearing it. The idea was to be able to staple the sides of the clothes and then take the clothes off and do your sewing. The staples would stay in place and they wouldn't scratch you when you took the clothes off. 

Maybe I had a weak stapler. Maybe I have weak hands. It didn't work when I tried it. It was very hard to get the staples through the fabric. Maybe this was super strong fabric.

I use chalk often to mark where I want to make a new seam. Chalk doesn't move or stab you while you have the garment on or take it off. It also doesn't hold the garment in place when you work though. Sometimes you want the garment to stay in the new position/shape as you work on fitting it correctly.

That brings us to pins. When I was fitting this dress on myself I used a lot of pins to make the dress fit the way I wanted. I put the dress on inside out and looked in a mirror as I pinned and re-pinned. I was able to make the dress fit in a new way and I could stop to look at it and adjust it again and again.

The pins scratched me when I took the dress off and I don't know how to prevent that. I always stab myself with pins and get scratches when I work with them. That's just the way it is.

Here is the new fit of this dress. It wasn't a difficult to alter the sides. When I altered the fit and made the dress a bit smaller it also made the hemline rise just a bit. The shorter length was right at the knee. That was exactly what I wanted so I was done working on this dress. 

This seemed like a perfect dress to go out to dinner, but I wasn't able to go out to dinner this night. I ate a super healthy salad. Then I got lazy with a cup of tea and this whole box of cookies. I meant to eat a few with my tea and I ate them all. Oops! Cookies are my weakness.

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