I finished my dress redo!!

Remember this post where I mentioned that I was going to refashion an old dress of mine for my upcoming Vegas trip?!?!

Well I finished it!  I had to abandon it for a bit so I could do some Valentine's outfits but I finished it!

Here is the before picture (My husband bought it for me the Christmas we were dating.  My Christmas present that year was the dress, jewelry and tickets to a show!  (yes he was quite romantic and still can be at times today!)  He picked out the dress too!  I loved it and still do but it no longer fits!  :-(  I gained quite a bit of weight since then and even though I have lost most of it, after three kids my body is just a different shape )-:)

The dress also had a jacket (which the sleeves were always tight...I never liked the jacket).

But here is the AFTER picture! Big change, huh?!?  

What I did was measure how long I wanted the dress to be from top to bottom and cut that length off the bottom of the original dress.  I put the cut off portion on my dress form where the cut off portion laid just a bit lower than where I wanted the top of the dress to be and pinned this to the dress form, as seen in the picture below.  (oh and I turned the dress inside out before pinning it to the form so you are seeing the lining showing in the picture)

I then pinned up the fabric to make darts so that the dress would be fitted.  I did two darts in the front and two darts in the back.  I then sewed my darts.  The picture below shows the right side of the fabric with the darts sewn.

I then used the material from the jacket to make a band around the top of the dress.  I used the original straps of the dress for the straps for the new dress, just sewed them back in place.


When I finished that I just felt like the dress was missing something.  So I started digging through my stash to find something to trim it with or give it a pop.  I found some lace and ribbon that I thought would work!


Here is a close up picture on the trim.

Here is one final look of the new dress!  I really think I want to find a cute little spring cardigan and I could wear this to church.  Of course for Vegas I will be dressing it up with accessories.

I would really like to be able to make one more outfit for Vegas but I don't have much time - we leave in 3 weeks!  But there has got to be something I can come up with :-)