Easy Way to Tailor a Dress To Fit
Earlier this year I purchased a 90's dress from MXMLST (mxmlst.co), a vintage shop in Canada, and I knew it would be a tad too big. Though I did not let that stop me from purchasing it and was determined to find a way to make it fit just right.
The print and cut of this dress are gorgeous, follow along to see the easy ways I made it fit me perfect like this.
This was the dress before I altered it. The puff sleeves were beautiful but I could not pull them off. I did not include a photo of me wearing the before dress because I could not do it justice and preferred not to take away from how beautiful the dress' sleeves was before I changed it.
I used my seam ripper to undo the thread and take off the sleeves.
This is the dress with the sleeves removed.
Next, I put the dress on inside out and pinned where I needed to take it in at the waist.
The shoulders were pinned as well to determine the best fit.
After I had an idea how I wanted the waist to fit, I sewed the new waist line with my sewing machine.
Then I sewed the shoulders in line with my pin marking to make the dress more fitted in the shoulders.
Next, the sleeve openings were rolled pinned and I sewed them down, too. With this part, I wanted to ensure the raw edges were hidden to prevent fraying.
Now this vintage dress fits perfectly and is ready to wear to farmer's market's and dinner on a patio. I absolutely love it! Do you have an easy way to make a dress fit just right?
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Love the print on this dress! You made it yours. There was a lot of fabric in the sleeves, maybe enough for a bag if you had another piece of red for the lining?
Thank you for this tutorial. Carol
nice job! here's a hot tip for future 'tailoring'! You can turn the platen on most staplers to make staples come out straight instead of both ends curved as staples normally are - push up from the bottom of the stapler & the little plate or platen where the staple lies if you staple without paper will lift up & can be turned - now you can use it to pin your seams for sewing as if the stapler is a straight-pin pinner- just remember the sewing machine will have to run across the pins aka staples perpendicularly just as if they were regular straight pins!