Sunday, March 23, 2014

Sewing Stuff - Summer Hawaiian Dress

The other weekend I was cleaning my apartment and going through my costumes, getting rid of the smelly and old ones, when I came across a pile of fabric that I had totally forgotten about. It was this black and cream Hawaiian pattern that I had originally bought for my sister so that she could get our friend Melody to make her a swishy dress. That never happened and its just been sitting there waiting for me to find it.
All 5 meters of it....
I think we bought so much of it at the time was because a.) it was on sale and b.) my sister is VERY chesty so we wanted to make sure there was enough to go around. On reflection we totally bought waaaaay too much. Oh well.


So when I found all this random free fabric I decided what better way to spend my morning that sewing a totally random summer dress! I didn't have a real pattern but after cruising around on the Internet I decided to try and make a funky high waisted circle skirt with a sort of retro bra top.

The skirt was easy enough for me to do, I just slapped down my black circle skirt as my base pattern and then added a long strip at the top to make it high waisted. Sewing the zipper into the back was a little tricky because I'm an idiot and don't have a zipper foot for my sewing machine but in the end I managed to get it all working.
 Next up was the top, which I found on this website. The original pattern is for a retro bra but I thought that it might work just as well for a regular top with a few adjustments. So I sketched the pattern out loosely and cut it all out.
Looks kind of weird right? While I was cutting it out I was a little mystified by where things were supposed to go but after looking at the blog again and moving things around like a jig saw puzzle I figured it out.
See? Not too difficult once you see the placement of things!
I sewed everything together, and then wound up going back to change a few parts to make it into a halter top instead of bra-top and then voila it was all done!
Looks pretty cute right? I liked the idea of having just a little bit of my stomach showing, modest but still having it be kind of flirty. The bra top works well but I might get a halter bra to wear underneath it as it's pretty low cut and I don't want my tits popping out if I dance in it during the summer time.
Summertime here I come!

Total Time to Make: 4 hours
Total Cost: Free
Things I learned while making this item: I really need to get a sewing foot for zippers and snap tape, it will make my life easier and will make me hate using zippers in things a lot less. You can't always live and work with spandex Voodoo.....

No comments:

Post a Comment