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Custom Wedding Dress & Kimono Upcycled Clothes | オーダーメイドウェディングドレス&着物ドレス

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DIY

Tutorial | How to Make a Cotton Sack Dress

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Tutorial | How to Make a Cotton Sack Dress

I love working on custom orders. Custom orders are a lot of work since it often requires me to make something out of patterns I don’t have, but give me fun challenges. It is an opportunity to expand different variations and patterns of work.

I was recently asked to make a modification of this dress. Her request was to keep the big front buttons, add rolled up sleeves, and big pockets. Before I made one for her, I made one sample to make sure the patterns work. It turned out the dress was pretty simple to make. The dress can be adjusted to fit different sizes easily.
Although I added darts for the previous dress, this custom order dress has none. It is all straight line sewing.

You need measurements of your:
♥ shoulder to shoulder measurement (16″ for me)
♥ from your shoulder to the top of the bust measurement (mine was 9″)
♥ desired length of the dress (in this case, I made it for 34″)

Material:
♥ About 1.50m of fabric
♥ covered button kit
♥ invisible zipper

Pattern:
1. Top panels
♥ Take your shoulder to shoulder measurement (mine is about 16″), and add 3″ each side. So the total width of the top front panel is about 23″.
♥ The length of your top front panel is the measurement of your shoulder to the top of your bust.
♥ Now your have a rectangle fabric, 23″ ×9″. Cut two (one for front, and one for back)
♥ Adjust the neckline, you can make it like boat neck, or round neck.

2. Skirt panels
♥ Take the length of your shoulder to shoulder measurement (16″), and multiply it by 1.5. In my case, this is 24″. This becomes the width of your skirt panels, front and back.
♥ The length of your skirt panels should be (your desired length of the dress) – (length of your top panel). In this case, 34-9=25.
♥ Now you have a rectangle fabric, 24″ ×25″.
♥ Gather the top of this skirt panel fabric, and shorten it (gather) so it becomes your shoulder to shoulder measurement (16″). Then sew this into the top panel, leave 3″ both sides for the sleeve.

3. Pockets, roll up sleeves etc.
This is your preference. Make many different variations!

4. Zipper should be added to the back middle, and I would cut the back top and skirt panels 0.5″ longer so it has extra seem allowance for installing zipper.

Please link to this post if you make a dress from this tutorial. Happy sewing♥

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Neck warmers

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I’ve long forgotten how much I enjoyed knitting. I had not knitted for so long, perhaps more than 5 years, but I recently rediscovered the joy of knitting while my mother was in the hospital. I spent hours in the hospital, waiting, and I needed to do something with the time. I could have read, but I wasn’t in the mood for reading, so I picked up a couple of yarns and started knitting.

The picture above was my second neck warmer I made. I first made the same one in white for my self. I used 100% wool white yarn to make a chunky neck warmer. I love it, and I take it with me everywhere I go now, except, 100% wool kind of irritate my skin a bit. So for the second one, I used 100% acrylic mohair yarn, and it came out much better – it is so soft! I added the second one to my shop. I didn’t use any patterns and I can’t read knitting patterns, they confuse me very much. So I just knitted in rib, and connected the ends at the end.

I think neck warmer is perfect for me, since I don’t like wearing turtle necks. They choke me and I feel like I can’t breath when I’m wearing them. So I always wear something open around neck, and I like the neck warmer since I can take it off easily, as oppose to turtle neck sweaters.


Oh, and by the way, I’m finally starting to figure out how to use twitter…I’ve had an account for months, but never updated it, but I’ll be good and update it more regularly from now on… follow me on twitter♡

Pretty bow

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From Left: Philip Lim Spring 2010 RTW from Style.com, Nightingale black dress from itsokmydear, & Sunshine’s red dress from Nadinoo.

Influenced by above lovely sweater/dresses, here is my attempt to incorporate bows in my closet…
I did not make sweaters themselves. They were ugly old turtle neck sweaters I found second hand. I cut off the turtle neck, and used that fabric to create bows. I made boat neck cut for gray sweater and back V line for purple sweater and finished them with black bias strips.
I like these much better than turtle neck sweaters, I do not like turtle neck very much… it makes my neck itchy and face look so big and moon-like!

Filed Under: DIY