Hi! It's Héloïse.
I study theatre and if it weren't for this pandemic, I would be presenting my play, our final project, right about now. But life didn't go quite as we had all planned and I ended up having to make a flower-themed dress for a video (I won't explain how we got to that, our thought process was kind of long).
So I used yet another bedsheet to do this. I figured an all-white look could be interesting! First, I took my prom dress out of my closet, because it had the bodice shape I wanted for this project. I proceeded to trace my pieces on some fabric and recreated those with my bedsheet. I ended up with enough pieces to have two layers and ironed those.
I sewed them all together, then joined the two layers together. I sewed an understitch on the wrong side of my bodice and ended up with this.
I had to close off the edges on the sides too because I don't have any zippers at home and I decided buttons would probably work for this type of project. So I made sure I had enough fabric on both ends to overlap them and add buttons and buttonholes.
Then it was time to make the skirt. I was about to cut out a circle skirt out of my bedsheet, but then realized that the reason I even got this bedsheet in the first place was because it was old. So the fabric around the middle was very thin and could not be used. I was bummed out; I really wanted to recycle this... But instead, I came up with a plan B.
I went through my fabric box and looked for one I had a lot of, at least enough to make a full circle skirt. I found this forest green fabric (I have no idea what it's made of) that I got a few years ago and proceeded to fold it twice before tracing and cutting out my circle skirt.
Then I had to do some research to understand how "button flaps" (as they are probably not commonly called) are created. I found this very helpful video (link here) and kind of messed up the process, but ended up with something that looked pretty okay nevertheless.
I went through our family bag of buttons, found 9 that looked the same (I know, these uneven numbers are annoying!) and sewed those on. I put off the buttonholes because they terrify me.
I then pinned and hemmed the skirt (I hate hemming circle skirts but what can you do).
I added straps to my bodice (which I absolutely should have done earlier when sewing the bodice together; now it doesn't look as cute) and moved on to the flowers.
Using my green fabric, I cut out 10 strips, of different widths and lengths. I ironed those (note: fabric that's been lying around on your bedroom floor has a tendency to wrinkle), folded them in half (on the long side) and sewed them and turned them inside out (on the right side). I then sewed a basting-stitch along each of those, gathered them all up and rolled them up into flowers, sewing everything by hand. I ended up with these cuties:
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| (Individually, they don't look so good, but as a whole, the illusion's there!) |
And then, since I couldn't put if off any longer... I moved on to the buttonholes. I followed the instructions in my sewing machine manual, looked up tutorials on Youtube… I was finally ready. But despite all of my efforts and my trial runs, it was no use. It always ended up in an annoying and gross ball of thread. Or even better, it would work perfectly fine and the next one would be completely ruined. I thought I’d gotten it this one time and tried it on the dress… I took it out of there as quickly as possible!
So let’s just say it didn’t work. I’m not exactly sure why : maybe my machine is just too old (is 15 years a lot in sewing machine years?) or maybe I just suck at doing machine buttonholes. So I did them by hand. And it was long. But those definitely worked and they’re not the cutest, but they do the job.
And that was it! This is the final product and I’m really happy with it.
-Héloïse
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