Happy Sunday my lovelies! I hope you’re enjoying the four day weekend as much as I am; I celebrated my third blogiversary (post coming soon), have been creating a miniature greenhouse and have been customising some clothes!
You see, I absolutely love fashion and art, so it’s pretty natural for me to customise and create my own clothes. In the past I have customised a few pieces with embroidery (you can check them out here) but more recently I’ve been delving more into tailoring clothes to fit my style so they aren’t just sat in the back of my wardrobe.
Something I love doing to different pieces is drawing or painting my own design onto them to give them a bit of a pattern and personality. One of my favourite things I’ve done with fabric pens is draw line art faces all over a pair of mom jeans that I hadn’t worn in a long time, but now I wear them all the time!
I also had an old oversized mens simple white t-shirt that I had cropped in the past and wore as pyjamas, so I made the decision to chop off its sleeves, put in some darts to make it fit a little better, opened up the sides and added some small ties as the method of doing it up and then finally I drew similar faces to the jeans all over it. It’s gone from a boring old t-shirt to a completely new and shaped top perfect for summer.
As well as customising clothes with fabric pens and paint, I also have slowly been personalising a denim jacket I picked up a while back with patches and pins, with the plan of covering it as much as I can!
Here’s what it looks like so far:
And finally, the project I undertook today, customising a very long summer dress I picked up so it would be a bit more me; and the good news is that not only did it take a mere 30s minutes from start to finish, but I also documented the process so you can do the same to any dresses you may want to shorten and change up a bit!
For this dress I decided that I wanted to shorten it to around knee length (I’m 5ft 3 for reference) since it looked a bit like it was drowning me with it being full length and then adding in a thigh split to give it that extra little pop.
So, here’s what we were starting with:
As you can see, the hem of the dress landed just above my ankle, so I made the decision to take off about 8-10 inches from it to get it around knee length for me.
So, here’s what you’re going to need:
- Fabric scissors
- Sewing Machine or needle and thread (and a lot of patience)
- Pins
- Something to mark your fabric with – I used a white gel pen but most pens/pencils will work
- Measuring tape or ruler
Now that you know what you’ll need, onto some instructions!
Step 1: Measure from the bottom of the hem how much fabric you want to take off, for me this ended up being 8 inches. And remember to add your seam allowance to the bottom of this so you get the length you want, for me I was happy with anywhere in between 8 and 10 inches being cut off so I just cut at 8 inches. Then cut off the bottom of the dress.
Step 2 : Fold over the new bottom edge of the dress and pin it down, I didn’t bother to iron the hem down but you can always do that if you want to be extra sure you’ve got a crisp edge.
Step 3 : Sew down your hem, and try on you new dress! (Told you this was a quick way to change up and customise a dress)
I personally decided to style my new dress with a cute black belt to accentuate my waist and a pair of combat boots and that was that! I love this dress so much more now compared to before; I feel like it suits my personality a lot better too.
Here’s a before and after comparison for you!
Compared to my white t-shirt transformation this probably doesn’t seem like a huge transformation but the small subtle changes make a difference making this dress feel younger and more my style.
And those are some of my customised pieces! I’m constantly thinking of new ways I’d like to personalise and change up my clothes and accessories, so if you like this post or try out some of these methods of customising pieces let me know and I’ll create more posts like this!
Do you like to customise your clothes? If so, what do you like to do to personalise them? Let me know in the comments!
Have a great weekend and Easter my lovelies!
Love,
The Weight Of My Worlds 