This gorgeous red dress was your basic strapless design (you can easily see where the lines of the original dress were, before I added the wide starps). But - it came with a matching shawl! Since the challenge in any makeover is to find matching/coordinating cloth, the shawl gave me some great material to work with.
The other challenge in any makeover is to work with the design of the dress, so your makeover doesn't end up looking like a bad fix that was just slapped on top. Since this dress had pleats on the bodice, I thought the makeover should have similar pleats as well.
How I did it:
* Cut two rectangles across the 17" wide shawl, 14" (rectangles ended up being 14" x 17"
* Sewed them into tubes (now they were 7" x 17")
* Pleated one end into wide pleats to match the dress
* Stitched the pleats down about 1" from the end of the rectangle
* Hand stitched the pleated end to the front of the dress
* Put the dress on my mannequin, pulled the rectangle up over the shoulder and down to the back of the dress, draped in place, adding a pleat and pulling tightly so it looked good to me.
* Hand-stitched it in place on the back of the dress as well.
This was unexpectedly fussy - there was a lot of "twiddling" - but I was really pleased with how it turned out.
Here are some more views (I ran out of batteries on the camera before I got to the back, but the back is almost exactly like the next makeover, which I'm about to post):
1 comment:
I can't tell you how excited I was to find this blog post after going over the modestprom.com site. I have a red strapless gown for my sister's wedding next weekend. I've been looking endlessly for someone who thought up my same idea to just add sleeves, but classy. You did it! Thanks a million. I'll be sending my readers on over to your ideas soon! modestmommies.blogspot.com
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