alterations |

Before

Sometimes an alteration will dramatically change the look of an item. And sometimes it is more about making something more comfortable. Today’s post was more the later. I adored this dress as soon as I tried it on at Revolve, but while everything else fit just fine, the sleeves were painfully tight. As in, I really couldn’t move my arms tight. I decided to take my seam ripper to the task, and see if I could make them work. If I couldn’t, I was going to make the dress sleeveless.

This is the sleeve inside out. When I went to alter it, I noticed that the sleeve is gathered at the hem. I decided to take apart this section, using my trusty seam ripper.

Turns out that the sleeves had what I will call hem tape, because I’m not sure if that’s the right term. Because of the bias of the fabric of the hem tape (maybe this is bias tape?) it made the sleeves have less give. It also revealed the gathering stitching. Gathering can be a lot of fun in some areas, but here, it is making the sleeves fit tighter.

I took out the gathering stitches, and pressed the sleeve with my iron. You can already see a noticeable difference between the altered and unaltered sleeves.

The hem tape wasn’t long enough to cover the newly altered sleeve, so I folded over the hem twice, pressed the heck out of it, and stitched it down with black thread.

And now, the finished results. The sleeves don’t look extremely different, but they fit SO much more comfortably.

Sometimes, items of clothing need complete make-overs to work. Sometimes, they just need a few simple changes. This dress was a case of the later. Above is the before picture, when I first bought this dress. It fit well overall and had a beautiful print. But it was a touch too long, the straps were too thin to cover bra straps, and the sides were a bit too high, digging painfully into my underarm area.

Changes: I hemmed about two inches from the bottom of the dress. I then used this fabric to create new straps, removed the old ones and installed these. I took off the bow detail, because it looked cheap and made layering cardigans a bit awkward. I lowered the “armhole” just a bit so that it would fit more comfortably. And voila! It looks and feels much more beautiful.