Quick dress-to-skirt tutorial

Hey all!

Firstly, I apologise for the current state of this blog, but I promise it shall come together very soon!

Ok, here's my first little project - making a slightly ill-fitting dress work for me! Let's take a quick peek at the end product ;D

So how did I do it? I used a dress, ruler, marker, needle and thread and scissors!

I started off with this dress...

I loved the fabric, but my favourite part was the swinger skirt. Unfortunately, the bust of the dress did not fit me... no hope lost! Lets see if we can save the cute swing skirt...

So I removed the problem top of the dress, cutting just under the sleeves. I tried to leave as much fabric as possible attached to play around with for the waistband.

Turning the skirt inside out, I measured out the thickness I wanted for the waistband... 5cm gives a measured sense of structure, particular as I will wear it around my waist, rather than my hips.

I used this point to fold down the fabric and pinned it in place with a few stitches (did I mention I don't have a sewing machine??). I repeated this on both sides and the back and front.

I then ironed the fabric in place, to give the waistband a definitive shape. Now, be careful ironing the fabric, making sure the iron's heat is most appropriate the the fabric type. In my case, the fabric was synthetic, so I used a low heat setting to avoid melting the fabric.

Turn it out the right way and voila! A great skirt, no sewing machine, no patterns, and in under half an hour!

Do you have any clothes that were 'almost-but-not-quite-right'? What did you do with them?