Adding Sleeves on a Dress for Dressember

 Hello Readers. I have been refashioning and wearing dresses all month in honor of Dressember. The idea is to wear dresses all month to raise awareness and money to help fund their work to fight human trafficking. Any gift can help, just $150 can fund a move to relocate a family that needs to start their lives again in a safe location. Go to Dressember.org to learn more about how you can help and how to give.

Let's talk about refashioning a dress for this special time of year. This dress was actually fine. It just didn't have sleeves. And it's cold out there. I could just add a sweater on top but I wanted to do something fun for Christmas. 

 

Before and after.

 

I found this Santa fabric at a thrift store and it was SO cute. There was not much of it and it was cut all around the edges. I had to really thing about what to do with it. 

 

Just look at these Santas!!

I cut off all the fringe. They tried to make a tie blanket and gave up, I think. My piece of fabric was getting smaller after cutting off all the fringe.

I cut what was left into 4 squares that were all the same size. I matched them up and put them together with the right sides facing each other and I made sure all the Santas were right side up. I am making sleeves without a pattern but I knew that I didn't want any Santa upside down. 

I cut a triangular piece off the squares. I want my sleeves to look good and sleeves are usually shorter under the arm. Trust me. It's going to be great.

Here are my 2 sleeves. I sewed them together with the right sides facing each other and then turned them right side out. 

I folded the straight end of my sleeve in and sewed a casing. I want to add elastic to the ends of my sleeves to gather the sleeves into a poof.

I threaded narrow elastic through the casing. It was a short piece of elastic compared to the sleeve so I accidentally pulled the elastic all the way through and had to start over. 

I held the end in my teeth like an animal to prevent it from happening again. When it was all the way through I tied the ends of the elastic into a knot and sewed the casing closed. 

I sewed the sleeves into the arm holes of the dress. The sleeves were really big compared to the arm hole and that gave me lots of gathered fabric and made really poofy sleeves. That is what I wanted. 

I really liked my new sleeves. I didn't alter the dress at all. I just added the Santa sleeves. 

 

Thank you for reading along and happy Holidays to all of you!

 

***Year End Update- This was fun and still a little dressed up. Perfect for Christmas.