e.louise: Liberty of London Dress

So, as many of you know, Liberty of London created a line for Target a while back (and it seems to have spurred new trend (or, more likely, I'm just late on catching this) in designers for Target: Tucker for Target, anyone?).

Anyway, I posted about my excitement for Target's designer line when it first debuted and managed to get my hands on a few items before they were all snatched up. A few months later, I was browsing the women's clearance section in Target and noticed that several of the LOL items had been marked down. Even though I didn't necessarily like the style of this particular dress and it wasn't available in my size, I loved the fabric. I really loved the tank dresses I had been seeing pretty much everywhere and thought it would be fairly easy to convert this dress into one. Somehow, I also managed to find a jersey tank top (at Target), in my size that matched the color of pink in the dress.

you can still find a limited # of items here

(On a completely different note, does anyone else wish Target would do a better job of displaying their items online? I think their clothing pictures are horrible).

Finally, about a week ago, I sat down to finish this project and I'm really pleased with the result. (Unfortunately I have no pictures of the dress reconstruction process- boo, bad blogger).

Shortly after I bought the dress, I detatched the top from the skirt with a seam ripper. The skirt had two parts, the top floral fabric and a thinner under skirt to prevent see-throughness. It also had elastic sewn into top area. When I took apart the dress, I also had to remove the elastic and gathering, which left me with a box-y, square skirt. I knew I wanted the skirt to sit more at my waist, so I pinned it to my dress form to figure out what I could do to adjust the size. I really didn't want to cut into the fabric or remove the top part of the skirt from the bottom, so I decided to apply the gathering technique to create the waist size I needed.

I sewed a stitch on the front and back waist of the skirt with a loose, wide stitch length and kept the ends long. I then held the top thread and gathered the fabric to get the waist length I needed. Once I got the gathering where I wanted it, I pinned it and resewed the gathering in place with a shorter, tauter stitch. The waist area ended up being a little looser than I wanted. To fix this, I added two pleats to the front and one pleat to the back so that it sat better on my waist. I then sewed in a strip of elastic to allow some give in the waist area, since I wasn't sewing in a zipper. For the top part of the dress, I tried on the skirt and the tank and pinned the tank where the two met. I cut off the bottom part of the tank, about an inch below my pin mark. I then pinned the tank to the skirt, matching side seam lines, and sewed the two together. The top ended up being a little lose (it looks really lose on my dress form, more so than it does when I'm wearing it), but it fits really comfortably and I like how it looks more like a shirt + skirt, rather than a dress.

I still have some left over jersey fabric from the original top and the bottom of the new top that I may fashion into some sort of accessory or embellishment, but I'm not sure if that will happen or not. I'm so glad I finally got a chance to finish one of the many projects on my sewing to-do list. I hope I can find an occasion to wear it out during the last few remaining weeks of summer :)