99-352 Final Project

Intention

The goal of  my project was to take a dress that had been sitting in the back of my closet and use some of the skills we had learned in class as well as some research to try to revamp it and turn it into a skirt that I could wear. 

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. 

Product

My final product was a "finished" skirt. Overall, the encasing for the elastic was not very even and the skirt bunched up a lot at the waistband and around the side. 

Reflection

Reflect on the process of making this project. What did you learn? What would you do differently?

If I could redo this project, I would definitely have picked an easier fabric to work with for my first project. The fabrics were very hard to deal with and a lot of the problems I encountered were related to the two fabrics not staying together correctly. I definitely would have started off with the dress hanging up or on a dress form rather than lying flat on a table. I would have also used an elastic waistband rather than trying to sew an encasing, as the fabric would have stuck better to the elastic waistband. I also would have cut the two fabrics separately, fit the fabric better to my waist, and then reattached them at the very end.

Alternative Project

Since my skirt didn't end up working out super well, I decided to do a miniature skill exploration further into crocheting. I learned and practiced some double crochet, and then tried to make a floral coaster. Looking back, I would used a smaller thickness of yarn.

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