Dupli Cating A Perfect Little Dress

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  Step 1

  The first step is to gather your materials. For the fabric I chose to go to my local thrift store, which has a great selection of used fabric. I think mine is actually an old Christmas cloth, but it is nice and thick, and the color is great!

• Step 2

  Secondly, after washing my fabric (to take out the thrift smell, and make sure that it will not shrink after I'm done making my dress) I laid it out on my floor (I don't have a big working table!) and laid down my dress.

• Step 3

  For the purpose of my dress, I decided to make my pattern into 6 pieces:
  1- Front Skirt
  2- Back Skirt
  3- Front of Bust
  4- Right side of bust
  5- Left side of bust
  6- Backside

  Some pieces are harder to draw due to curves (depends if you are curvy or not...and what dress you are making)
  My suggestion is that when in doubt, draw your line a bit wider, it's always easier to cut off fabric then to add some!

• Step 4

  By This point you should have a piece of fabric that looks like a chalkboard pattern, take out your scissors and cut! (I strongly recommend that the first time you try this out you don't use an expensive fabric, or at least make a muslin before if you plan to)

• Step 5

  Take the pieces and put everything together with pins and put the dress on (or on your dress form if you are lucky enough to have one). By this point, you should see if you'll need to add some darts. If you do, take the dress off and take the time to mesure and pin them correctly so that they are symetric. For example, I had to add two long darts to the back in order to make the dress fit better.

• Step 6

  At this point, you can start sewing. I decided to start at the top. Shoulders, followed by the bust pieces. I only did the side under one arm pit, since my zipper would go on the other side. I then pinned the zipper to the other side to see if the dress would close properly. Ideally, when you sew a zipper on, having a "foot for zippers" on your sewing machine is the best to do a very close sewing line.

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  Step 7

  One your done putting all your pieces together, adjust the lengh of the dress, finish all your seams, and add whatever details you want to your dress and Voilà!!

  I recommend Washing before wearing so you can take all the chalk (or other drawing tool you've used) away!

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live2create · Ottawa, Ontario, CA · 13 projects 1st September 2010

great results!

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Dorine C. · Cardiff, Wales, GB · 3 projects 14th July 2010

I have done this in the past, first time turned out great but second time the dress was too tight. You can't win everytime I guess!

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Autonomous · Phoenix, Arizona, US · 22 projects 2nd June 2010

I've got this gorgeous black dress that is ever so slightly tight on me' and i love this idea! I'm going to try giving it an extra inch here and there on the remake to fix my fit problem, and if that goes well I'm going to make another for casual wear out of cotton poly

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