How I finally managed to make my own dress

I don;t really do patterns. I tried some, but they just never seem to make as much sense as logical thinking and using your own body to alter things to. So this dress is yet another non-patterned thing I made. And actually, the design is so easy you don't need one. All you need is to very long strips of fabric for the top and a simple A-line bottom. It's the way you put this dress on that makes in more complicated, because you can wear it in many ways. What to choose!?

The dress flat on the floor

The way I was wearing it yesterday

From jumper to skirt.

When my friend moved she left me a whole bag of clothes to hand in at the clothes exchange. she has a smaller size than I have so none of it fits me, but I some things were great for refashioning!

I cut the top part of, leaving as much fabric for the bottom part as possible,

I turned it inside out and pinned the part where I cut the fabric.

I sewed it with matching tread et voilá! 

making skirts into dresses seems to be my thing.

I've just finished another not so very original, but still very nice, bit of refashioning. This time I've put a very boring black dress together with a nice, but too long, skirt. The result is a poofy printed dress with a black bodice. A lot more fun!

The black dress in question

The skirt with the awkward length.

The result of putting them together.

Christmas time!

With me living abroad, buying Christmas presents gets extra expensive. Because each time I go home I am bound to have missed at least one birthday. This time, it's two. And a friend who is going to study abroad (survival gifts!). That plus Christmas gifts takes up half my suitcase (and bank account!) this year. And then there is my friends here that need some presents as well. Present galore! Because of this overload of presents, I decided to make part of it myself. Daddy is getting homemade mulled wine. The friend who travels abroad a memory jar. But of course I could not skip the sewn presents!

Here two of the things my friends got:

Travel pillow

Blanket

Simple but cute!

A new dress without spending money

So graduation is coming up (I passed my masters with merit, yay for me!) and the ceremony with a lot of picture taking is in sight. We are doomed to hire a ridiculously expensive (47 Pounds for a day, oh my)  and unflattering gown which leaves me absolutely no budget to buy something to wear underneath. Since nudity probably won't do well at the ceremony I had to be creative. The gown is green and black, so colors in the red and pink range aren't a possibility. Lucky for me, I found a green dress made out of a shiny fabric at a clothing swap. Costs; exactly zero. The dress had a really awkward  length, which made me look like a midget. With this length, there was just too much green going on.

So I decided to get rid of some inches at the bottom, and do something to break up that endless same emerald-ish green by adding a ribbon in a darker green.

And see here, the result! Not a big change, but it made the dress from unflattering and slightly boring to wearable for graduation!

Old + Old = New

While I was searching through my closet for items for a clothing swap, I found two doubtful things. I still liked them, but was never wearing them because they were just not right. The skirt was too long for my slightly short legs and the all-grey dress was just a tad boring. So when my friend came with the story about people who customized old clothes into new ones for a year long, these items seemed to be the perfect ones to start with.

The skirt

The dress

I got rid of the top layer of the dress (I might use that for something else) so just the lining was left.

I replaced the top layer with the skirt and sewed it on in the same shape the original layer was attached.

And tadaa!

And then there was my brand new dress.