Dress Refashion: Giving a boring grey dress a cute lease of life

Hi 🙂 Below is my latest masterpiece…

OK, OK, I cheated. I didn’t make the whole dress. I started with this:

A plain grey dress, from my local car boot sale. I love the style and fit and it’s so comfortable – but it looks boring. It’s not just plain but it’s grey. My daughter wears grey to school. Enough said!

So I thought I would buy it anyway and jazz it up a bit. I ummed and ahhed for a couple of weeks over what best to do, but I knew I wanted to add something around the neckline.

Then a few days ago I had a lightbulb moment and dashed off to dig out this old dress that I like – but really it’s too big for me so I don’t wear it a lot. I love the neckline. I think it’s cute a looks a bit vintage-y – which I can do in small doses!

It was obvious to me what the best thing to do would be. Cut off the pretty neck piece and whack it on the boring dress! (Luckily the neckline is the same shape.) So that’s what I did. It wasn’t even as fiddly unpicking all the delicate material as I expected it to be. Once unpicked I had this:

I wasn’t going to bother putting anything on the arms, but once I had attached the neckline part I thought it didn’t quite look finished so I unpicked the bobbly strips around the arms and stitched them on too!

I’m pretty impressed with myself. The reason for that is that I did it all by hand, and usually I like to machine sew. I always thought it’s just more fun. But actually, once I got started hand stitching this on, I found it rather relaxing and not as frustrating as I expected (I like the speed of the machine; I like to see my makes finished as quickly as possible, and hand sewing just takes longer!)

I do like simple little refashions like this. I will wear the dress a lot now it’s not so boring! I would love to upcycle clothes more adventurously in the future; I love how you can turn an old item into something new and pretty and fresh.

Beth x