Dress into Tote Bag Refashion

Hey! Hi! It’s been FOREVER! Like, a really, long, unacceptable time. I haven’t been here for so long because my mom and I were sewing my wedding dress!!! Head on over to my blog to read this whole post, and to see the DRESS SNEAK PEEK! AHHHH YAYAnyways, let’s just jump right into the refashion:

Turn a dress into a tote bag!!

Yes, I only tilt my head to one side obviously!

So I found this dress like a year ago while Steven and I were in Florida. It’s Calvin Kline, I love the colors and the fabric feels amazing. The only catch, it’s WAY too big. I haven’t done anything with it until now because I wasn’t quite sure HOW TO do anything to it. My normal sew-up-the-sides wasn’t going to work because of the tiers and the bunchiness, I feel like it would just get off and weird, plus there’s a side zipper so that really throws that out the door. It’s also super wrinkly, I tried ironing it for a moment then said heck with it, I’m making a tote bag haha

This project is actually SUPER EASY and I can see it being adapted to many many different dresses or tops (and consequently, me having WAY too many tote bags… or is that even a thing?) I feel like this dress made it even easier because it basically had lines saying CUT ME HERE – so yeah, tote bag. 

As you can see, I literally just cut the bottom white part off (I’m thinking about making it into a cosmetic bags of sorts to go inside the tote) Two of the things that make this dress so great for a tote bag, are the facts that it's lined, and it has pockets that turn into outside pockets for keys and cell phones! 

So from here, I just sewed the bottom! The ONLY tricky thing about this project is how you sew the lining and outside, and remembering to leave a hole when sewing the outside so you can flip it back right side out. Basically, you want the lining seam to be facing OUT towards the outside, and the outside to be facing IN towards the lining, so in the end you cant see any of the seam allowance. Does that make sense? To do this, first I sewed the lining WRONG SIDES TOGETHER as is like so:

And you're pulling the outside fabric up, so you can sew RIGHT SIDES together, so it looks like this:

Sew across just like the lining, and remember to leave the flipping hole!

 Flip it through, and you're done!!

Thanks for reading! :-D

- Hillary