Magical DIY Sewing Project: Dress Made from a Curtain!

Welcome back everyone. In a couple of weeks, we are going to the most beautiful country, in my opinion, in the whole world, Ireland. And I really feel like I have to make a dress for the occasion, or two. So the choice of fabric was not a question, as a couple months ago I went to Ikea and I picked up this pair of curtains. I just fell in love with the color of it, and the patterns, it's so beautiful. I don't know why don't they sell this type of things as per meter fabric, I would just buy all of it. But even so, for the price, I got 6 meters of fabric, which is plenty. Even after this dress, I will have so much left over for other projects. So keeping in mind the fabric, the location, and the fact that we're gonna hike a lot, I started putting together a mood board, and a definite design emerged very clearly from it. First, I made a mockup, using my bodice block as a base. This is something I made with blood, sweat and tears for another project, that grey dress you saw a sneak peek of in my tear dress video, and I've been using ever since. Once I was happy with the fit of the mockup, I cut all the bodice and the lining pieces out. Again, I had a lot of darts to sew, which I did, using that little trick I showed you in my tear dress video. Then I assembled the lining pieces and the bodice. This little puffy sleeve needs to be gathered both on the top and the bottom, and I did that by stitching a line and pulling on the bobbin thread. I attached the cuff piece, pinning the middle first, then the two ends, and trying my best to distribute the gathers evenly between them. Then I sewed it together, folded the cuff in half and the edge back again. I carefully sewed this edge to the folds, trying my hardest so the stitches wouldn't show from the right side. Then all I had to do to finish the sleeve was to sew the longer edge up, and because this part won't be lined, I also serged this seam. Then I attached them to the bodice. Time for the lining! I only sewed it together around the neckline, but I also understitched it so the lining wouldn't show from the outside. To make the front fold of the bodice extra crisp, I added a double-sided interfacing. On the other side of the opening, where the buttons will go, I added an extra panel for strength and repeated the same steps. Folding the raw edges back, I tacked them down to the lining by hand. And now the bodice is ready! Well, more or less. In my dreams, this is the dress you run towards a ruined castle in Ireland, so of course it needs a bow in the back, which in my mind also sort of calls for a belt and belt loops in the tailoring as well. The belt part is easy, I just cut and attached a sufficiently wide strip to the bottom of the bodice. The belt loops are just little strips with the long edges folded in and folded in half. So the bodice is nearly ready. All that needs to be done is obviously the buttons and the buttonholes, but I think I will do that last, because it's better to see where everything needs to go first. I also need to line this part, which I'm just gonna do by putting it on the dummy and folding this back, pinning it down nicely and sewing it down by hand. And this belt part, which already has the hoops in and the top, and the bottom, I'm just gonna sew it to the skirt. And I came up with this idea for lining it. So I'm gonna sew it on like this, using this same stitching line. And when I fold it down, it's gonna be lined perfectly. Cool, isn't it? I want this dress to be sort of functional for hiking, so I'm going to choose the length of it accordingly. So I took my favorite skirt and used its length as my guideline and cut two rectangles that long and as wide as the fabric. Because I always forget the pockets, I decided to add them right away. I used my favorite skirt for the pattern and cut out four layers from the lining fabric. Then I sewed them together in pairs, leaving one centimeter at the opening unsewn. I also serged these edges. Then I sewed the opening of the front pocket to the side seam of the skirt, and also understitched these edges, so the pocket lining would stay inside at all times. This is a sort of special pocket that goes into the waistband, so when you sew the side seams up, you can decide yourself how big you want the opening to be. So I made a mistake while cutting the skirt, because of course I did. I always screw up the easiest parts of the dress, the skirt, because I was like, I measured this one and it was 77 centimeters, and I was like, cool, add two centimeters for selvage and cut it. And I cut it, serged it, and now I realized that I wanted to do these kind of pin tucks on the bottom, so I don't have extra for that now. So what I figured that I will do, I will cut it where the pin tucks are supposed to be, add some extra fabric for that, and try and hide that seam line inside one of the pin tucks. And hopefully that will camouflage it enough, and it won't be visible on the final piece. But I'll have to do some math and figure that out. So I did the math and cut two strips of fabric that I attached to the ends of my skirt panels. To hide the seam line, I placed the first pin tuck in a way, so the seam would fall to the back side of the tuck. Once it was all nice and ironed, I gathered the top of the skirt with two parallel stitches. To finish the front opening on the skirt, I added a facing. To double up the fabric for the snaps that I will eventually place there. To attach the skirt to the bodice, I first pinned the side seams to each other, then I pulled on the gathering threads and pinned it together, distributing the pleats as well as I could. Luckily, with the extra panel I added for the pin tucks, I had quite a bit of an allowance for the hem, which allowed me to fold it up to a point where the stitching of it will be hidden by one of the pin tucks. So instead of having to blind hem it or tack it down by hand, so the stitching wouldn't be visible, now I could just simply topstitch it down. To finish the dress up from the interior, I put it on a dummy and folded the waist lining over the selvedge edge of the skirt. This was then sewed down by hand. Finally, trying it on, I'm super happy with the results. Now it's time to mark out where the buttons will go. From the waist down, I'm using a combination of snaps, hooks and eyes to close the front opening invisibly. The last little detail I added to this dress was a ribbon I made from a tiny piece of scrap fabric I found laying around that just happened to match the lighter green of this dress perfectly. I had to piece it together from a dozen smaller strips of fabric that I sewed into a tube and flipped inside out. And with that, we are done!