Self drafted dress...

Hello again guys! This post is about my self drafted dress.

So the skirt part was much the same as my other posts. Tube it, shirr it, attach it. You get the picture. 

Now the bodice was the difficult bit. I had an idea of how I wanted it to look, so I started off with just draping the fabric on myself. I'll spare you the pics haha! 

I then made a muslin of the bodice with some old cotton fabric I had (I'll be honest, it was a cheapo sheet from the charity shop!) 

I actually saved myself some effort with this. I didn't want the hassle of interfacing, or bias binding. So I cut two bits for the bodice, sewed then wrong sides together, turned it out and have it a good pressing. 

 

You can kind of see here that's it's the same both inside and out :) 

I pinched the middle and put a few stitches in. 

I then sewed the bodice onto the skirt portion, and added some straps. 

You can see here that the gathers have been stitched into the bodice. Personally, I think it could have been neater. It ended up being a bit bulky on the inside. I imagine this would be easier if I had an over locker! (Or room for one haha!)

I was very pleased with this dress. Much like the last few projects, I wanted something quick to take on holiday. This was a bit more time consuming than the others, but it only took an evening and a couple of hours the next day - I needed my trusty sidekick Mr to check my sizing alterations as obviously I don't have eyes in the back of my head! To be fair, I've trained him well :D 

Speak soon!

Refashioned crop top...

Next up is a refashioned cropped top into a dress. 

I loved this top, but unfortunately I am rather blessed in the bra department, so it kind of hung off of me and made me look larger than I am. I like a good fitter top half! 

I had some spare black fabric that I gathered with elastic. I then used a zig zag stitch to sew it onto the top. 

The zig zag stitch allows for a certain amount of elasticity to the waist of the dress. 

This was still a fairly simple refashion for me. As I said in my last post, I do love a quick project :) 

Until next time :) 

Graduation dress...

I've been a busy bee lately! I have made countless items of ACTUAL WEARABLE CLOTHES! Not just dresses either, everyday skirts and blouses too. I've also done a lot of re-fashions. Here is one I bought this week for £1...

This far too long black and red polka dot dress! Miraculously, not a bad fit :) But the poor unloved dress had hundreds of moth holes and tiny little tears. It also had some lovely shoulder pads haha! I didn't take pics of the moth holes because there were so many of them, I would still be there fixing them now!

Anyway, as the fit was fine, I simply cut the bottom of the dress into a slightly dipped hem (to help cover my ginormous bum!!), fixed the holes and tears, and also stitched up the button holes. As a lady with a larger top half, button down dresses and tops tend to gape and show everything off haha!

Oh, and it has pockets!!

Look how flowy it is!!

I had kind of forgotten that my graduation is next week, so how lucky was it to come across this dress? I actually saw it as I was on my way out of the shop! And for £1?! I will be the cheapest dressed person there, and I won't even care because I made it look awesome :D

Until next time :) 

I branched out!...

Ok guys, I have been suuuper busy on the craft front recently. making lots of clothes for myself which is nice :) I have also decided to venture onto etsy. So please do have a gander at my shop and tell me what you think, or what I should list there, that'd be great!!

Here's the link: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/WhyDidIMakeThat?ref=s2-header-shopname

You may need to copy that into your browser bar, I'm not so tech-savvy, did know how to make it clickable haha!

Oh, by the way, I do plan on updating you all with this crafting malarkey I've been doing. It just happens that I work all day, then I craft in the evening, so there's never any decent lighting around. I will do it soon. Promise :)


Byee!

Granny dress refashion...

Hello all!

I picked up a rather large granny dress in the summer with the intentions of making it fit me. I really liked the pattern and the light fabric. (Plus, it was only £1!)

(It was a size 20 and someone had hand-sewn up the buttons for modesty. How sweet!)

I usually take ages to plan what I'm going to do with a refashion. But this time I decided to just dive in and chop bits off!

(I chopped off about 10 inches from the bottom)

(I took the sides in and here's what I was left with.)

Now normally, I would have stopped there. But in all honesty, am I really going to wear a summer dress in the freezing cold, windy Plymouth winter? No. Also, I just didn't love it. I'm trying to make things i'm actually going to wear, not things to live at the back of the wardrobe waiting for good weather, or waiting until I have the confidence to wear. So I carried on chopping.

Here's what I finished with....

(A cute little blouse!)

I'm quite pleased with this. I left the sleeves as long as this because it's cold, and I think it's a more mature length. I unpicked the hand-stitching down the buttons so that it would open up again. This allowed me to take the sides in a bit more to make it more fitted. You can't see it too well, but where the buttons finish, is where the bottom of the dress started to fan out. It now forms a little bit of a peplum, which is quite flattering on my hips.

I'll be trying to make some handmade Christmas gifts over the next few weeks. I won't be blogging about them until after Christmas though, some of my readers are some of the people who will be receiving those gifts!! 

I'll try and update soon!!

Halloween refashion!

Good afternoon everyone!

(That would have said good morning had I not been so fragile earlier today. Great night out :) )

Ok, so as you probably know, I study architecture. It pretty much takes up all of my time. So when I was invited out with the other half, one of his friends and his girlfriend for halloween, I was sure it was just going to be a calm evening. No dress up involved. Then I found out I had a few days off and we could actually have a proper night out!!

I only found this out on Wednesday. Halloween was Thursday. I haven't gone out for halloween in years, and I didn't have an outfit!

Enter...this 4 sizes too big, flappy sleeves, ankle length red little number that I bought for 50p and one of our charity shops! (it was 2 for £1 day, so I got another new top as well :D )

(I forgot to take a photo of me wearing this, sorry!)

So the dress was a lovely heavy jersey fabric, and barely even needed proper hemming to be perfectly honest. All I did was cut off about 35cm from the bottom and cut off the flappy sleeves - luckily the way it was sewn in meant that if I pulled the sleeve tight enough when I was cutting it, it pulled all the little loose threads out too, so it was literally just a case of cutting them off! Oh, I did tighten the sides of the sleeve a bit when I added darts to the side. Nothing wrong with them, I just didn't want people to see the sides of my bra. The best thing about this project is it took less than half an hour!

Here's what I ended up with...

(Nice eh? Not bad for a simple refashion)

And just because it was for a halloween outfit, here it is with me all done up...

Oooh, also...look at all the extra fabric I've got! I don't know what to do with it really, red isn't something that's normally in my colour palette. Any ideas?

It's ok though, we were all safe that night. There was a doctor present at all times :)

A few old projects...

Hello my lovelies. I'm sorry I have abandoned you, I have been a busy bee.

Here's a handbag I made over the summer, I also spoilt my mum and my fiances sister and made them one each too :)

 



It was more of an experiment than anything, the ones I gave away were much more lovely and higher quality. But it was a chance for me to try out some new and old things I hadn't done in a while.

Buttonholes...

 



 

 

Stitching the edges neatly so you can't see it underneath or on top...

 

 

 

And line it nicely. I've done this before, but I hadn't done it in a while.

 

 

 



Overall, a lovely short project. It only took me an afternoon, and it made 3 nice cheap and cheerful summer bags!


Something else I've done before is make Old Western style dresses for Reenactment groups. I don't have photos of the other ones, but here's one I made a year ago...

 

Here's the pattern I had...

 



 

This is the top part (shame you can't really see the shape properly unless it's on)...

 

And here it is on. The skirt needed a hooped petticoat to fill it out nicely, and the lighting doesn't do the outfit justice. But it did look lovely and got many compliments on the reenactment day!

 





Ok, so I think that's it for today, I've got to dash off to uni now, but I will keep updating! Oh also, do leave comments on what you do and don't like, it'd be nice to get some feedback!

Have a great weekend everyone! x