Process

First, I was going to use pins and a basting stitch around the dress to hold in the pleats, and then cut the top of the dress off, then sew in a casing for an elastic, string the elastic through the casing, sew it closed, and then close the casing for the elastic. I watched several videos on YouTube for similar projects to land on this approach. I considered cutting the fabric separately and then reattaching everything at the end, but I was wary of the pleats coming out. Some design choices I had to make were whether I wanted to use a much thicker, visible elastic waistband, rather than encase a smaller elastic waistband. I mostly decided to go with the encasing due to the comfort of the elastic that I bought. During the process, some challenges that I encountered were the difficulty of working with the two slippery fabrics the dress was made out of. I resolved this by hanging the dress up while I was making my initial basting stitch so that the fabric wouldn't move as much.