First attempt at dress making

My blog following started because i needed an online tutorial to confirm my suspicions on how to make a plastic bag holder. I then found a lovely blog detailing every step and thus giving me a solid grounding on how to make it instead of guessing the whole way through stitching, that lovely blog was Make It and Love It.

Upon discovering this blog i then needed to find more, i found such lovely blogs that focused more on dressmaking, one of which is Tilly and the Buttons. Since then i have read posts and looked at pictures, even created a board on Pintrest to pin things that i thought i would like to sew. There's a problem however, I'm not really very good at sewing.......oops!!

I went back to Ireland for two weeks while I'm still on my summer holidays from uni and found a lot of things that were lying in the back of my wardrobe that i was never going to wear anymore. It felt such a waste to just throw them out though, especially as i had never worn some of them. I had in particular a summer dress, which in fairness was only from Pennys (Primark) but i really like the pattern it had on it, the only problem was that the top of it was very ill fitting.

I decided that while at home with the availability of a sewing machine and some advice from my mum that i could turn it into a skirt. Thus began a lot of deliberating on how to go about it, what width elastic to use and how to keep it in place. I inspected all the skirts i could find to see how they had their elastic encased and then decided....it was time to cut the dress!!

I just chopped the top part off and removed a band that gathered the skirt in. To be honest after pinning the waistband in place it was kind of easy, and weirdly relaxing whizzing the sewing machine along to line of pins. That was until i saw that i didn't thread my bobin in properly and it hadn't been sewing properly the whole time. Well, i had to put back in all the pins again, take out my tape measure AGAIN and make sure the waistband was the same thickness the whole way around. I'm not going to lie, it tried my patience at this part but i got through it and finally had sewn the waistband into place. I then pushed the elastic through, sewed that into place with four lines to stop it from moving and twisting inside 'it's house'.

The fabric was a little see through though so i thought while i had the sewing machine out i would make a slip to go underneath, because I'm not very proficient at this sewing game a decided to not try and line the skirt with it but make a separate slip altogether. I had a dress that no longer fitted but had a lovely white cotton lining that i needed and so ripped the stitches out and got my slip fabric from there. I then made the slip pretty much the same way as i did the skirt but with a much thinner elastic. I will admit i was pretty worried that i would make the whole thing too tight on my stomach having two elasticated waistbands around it but so far it's been ok.

What i liked the most was taking two garments that i was never going to wear again and turned them into something usable and pretty. It's weirdly satisfying, maybe that's why sewing your own clothing is starting to take off again! 

Have you ever tried to re-purpose a garment of clothing? Do you wish you had better sewing skills too?

P.S sorry for the lack of pictures of the sewing process, that's not really my kind of thing since i am a scarily messy worker and so none of the pictures would have been very pleasant to look at. Also the pictures here are dubious, since i live in a teeny flat that lacks natural light, but hopefully you can see the nice pattern on the skirt! 

Chloe x