DIY for Courtney's Dress

Happy Friday! We are gearing up for one busy, sleepless weekend! We have a wedding Saturday at the lovely Bay Seven and a Brunch wedding Sunday morning in a beautiful backyard in Pittsboro! What that means to us is that we get to go to bed late and wake up early! Onto the the reason for this post....how to make this awesome dress that is blowing Dana's creation out of the water! Visit the "Big Reveal" post to see the landslide yourself!

The find - I spent about 10 dollars on all these items at the local Goodwill- I  was looking for a fabric I liked and found the skirt first - it was made very well with a liner and pockets. I could work with that!

I knew I wanted to add interest to the top with ruffles and make the top sleeveless - so I started by ripping  out the seams that connected the sleeve to the body of the shirt.

I used scissors to open up the sleeve once it was detached from the shirt - you can see how much fabric we had to work with! Plenty for a ruffle!

Cutting a strip of fabric from the sleeve to make the ruffle. We ended up using three strips of fabric, each the length of the sleeve, to create the ruffle for the top of the dress.

After cutting off both sleeves we cut the collar off as well --- I decided at this point that I was going to use the ruffle as a collar instead.

I rolled the collar to give it a finished look.

We cut a slit up the back and added a facing to make the finished seem. We did this because I did not want to change the waistband on the skirt...as it fit perfectly around the bottom part of my rib cage...and I needed to be able to get in and out of the dress...this seemed like the easiest option...I can still use the button and zipper on the skirt and have my top attached!

We made the ruffle by first making a tube with the sleeve fabric strips. We then used a long basting stitch up the middle to make the ruffle. You gently pull this stitch out of the "tube" and your fabric will begin to ruffle. The more you pull it out the tighter the ruffle will be...so it is really up to you as far as the ruffle "look"

This was the easy part! I wanted to make the skirt a little shorter so we re-hemmed it by first ironing a double fold down.  We then used the blind hem stitch on the machine to make a new finished edge.

Hemming done!

For some reason, this was the most nerve wracking part to me! We cut the bottom of the shirt off to make it the appropriate length for the dress

Evenly attached the shirt to the skirt - started by making sure the button and zipper on the skirt lined up with both sides of the slit in the back of the dress.

Finished Product! I actually really like the dress and will get tons of use out of it!

So I won't say it was simple...in fact my Mother in Law helped me execute several of my ideas to make the outfit come together! Something I did not photograph/mention is it took several try-ons and a couple of darts to get the arm holes just right...After the sleeves came off they were a bit too large so we used two darts to bring them in and make the top fit!