Hello! It’s Annika. Today, I’m going to show you how to turn one dress into two.
[music plays]
Today I'm going to film myself whilst I try and replicate a dress.
This dress, in fact.
I really, really like the style of this dress, and after I posted pictures of me wearing
it on the interwebs, a bunch of you asked me to make a tutorial for a similar style of dress.
But I really had no idea how I would make this kind of dress from scratch, so I thought
then I set about first trying to “reverse engineer” the thing.
And so this video morphed into a video where I show you some methods and tips and tricks
for copying how you would go about replicating or "reverse engineering" your own dress. Or
- I guess this could also work for a shirts, if you don't wear dresses?
Anyway, let’s get started!
So, let’s talk about fabrics. The first thing that you want to do is to find a fabric
type that’s really similar to the one used in the item you’re duplicating.
The fabric in this pink dress is a light knit with a small amount of stretch to it.
I’m going to need to use fabric which is similar.
This fruit-printed fabric is pretty much the same, plus it’s really cute,
so I’m going to use this.
Then, I scrutinized the insides of the dress, and I figured out how many individual different
pieces of fabric the dress was made out of.
So, I got my dress and some paper to make a pattern on – I’m using wrapping paper.
And… whoops. These two things have the same exact pattern, so that’s going to be nice
and confusing for the camera.
I folded the dress in half, with the collar flipped out of the way to expose this full
bodice piece. I'm copying the front part of the dress first.
Then, I trace around the bodice. When I get to these parts that are connected to other
bits of fabric, I use these pins to stab through the fabric on the seamline, and into the pattern
paper below. This will make small, faint marks onto the paper, and let me trace the proper
shape of this seam.
So, to recap, I’ve just traced half of this front of the dress onto paper. This middle
triangle section uses a separate piece of fabric to the main bodice, so I’ll be copying that later.
Then, I add half an inch of seam allowance to every side of the pattern, except for here,
because this is where the pattern will lie on the fold.
Then I cut this pattern piece out, and I do the exact same thing for the back.
Then I add a half-inch seam allowance, on all the edges except for the one that’ll
sit on the fabric fold. So notice here, that where the dress was folded, that’s where
I’m then going to put “cut on fold”, and where I will be placing the pattern on
the fold of the fabric. And I also make a little note that the stretch of the fabric
needs to run this way – across the bodice, just like in the original dress.
Now the skirt is just a gathered rectangle, so instead of wasting paper making a pattern,
I’m just going to take the length of the skirt, adding 1 inch for seam allowance at
both the top and bottom. And then I take the width, multiplying by 2 to get the entire
front and back of the skirt, and then adding a good 20 inches to allow for it to be all
ruffled and gathered.
Then I turn the dress inside out and I copy this triangle – with an added seam allowance
of half an inch all the way around. And lastly, I copy the collar, which I lay
on top of my pattern paper like this. I traced around the collar, and added a seam allowance
to the outside edge. I added an extra inch of seam allowance because these collar edges
are going to be sewn to something else twice – so it requires two lots of a ½ inch seam
allowance. And I’m going to need 4 of these pieces.
So, these are all the pattern pieces for the top of the dress (and for the skirt, I’ll
just need to cut out a rectangle) – so, let’s go and cut out some fabric!
So I use the pattern pieces to cut out the front piece,
the back piece, two of these triangle bits,
a rectangle that’s 11 by 60 inches, and four collar pieces, and for this I use
a different, white cotton fabric.
Then the first sewing step is to place the back and front bodice together, right sides
together, and I sew them together here.
Then I place the triangle pieces right sides together, and sew them together across here.
Note that I’m using a zigzag stitch for all of this, because the material I'm using
is stretchy. You need to use the right stitch for your material.
I’m then going to flip the triangle around and sew it together with the wrong-sides touching.
Then I gathered the long edge of the rectangle skirt piece.
I did this by sewing long basting stitches along the top edge, then grabbing the top
stitch, gently pulling on it, and pushing the gathers along.
I adjusted the ruffles so that the length of the piece would match the circumference
of the bottom of the top.
So basically, if I can fold it in two and it matches the top, plus about 1 inch hanging
over, we’re good to go.
So then I flip this skirt bit over, and I’m going to sew it to the top right-sides together,
with the skirt upside-down on the top, like this.
I’m just going to pin the two together…
And it needs to get sewn on, all the way around. Where the two ends meet up, they’ll also
need to be sewn together like this.
Yay, pretty!
Now, back to the collar, I’m placing each pair right-sides together, and sewing them
together like this.
I clipped off the corners and the edges here to make the corners look neater, and then
I turn both these collar-tube-pieces the right way around. I use scissors to help me to get
those corners nice and crisp.
Then, I have a look at the original dress to see exactly how the collar is attached,
which is like this – it's actually sewn onto the inside of the dress. The triangle
also seems to get stitched into this at the same time. So I insert the triangle where
I want it to sit. Then, after I check out the placement of the collar pieces on the
front, I flip them over to the back of the fabric, and I sew the three pieces together
all of the way around the collar.
I end up with this, and to finish this off I sew these two ends together.
To add cuffs, I cut out a rectangle of stretchy fabric that’s just a bit smaller than the
circumference of the sleeve opening.
I sew this into a loop, then I fold it in half lengthways, and I place it around the
top of the sleeve, so that the raw edges are all matching, and then I sew them together like this.
And the last thing I do is to hem the bottom of the dress, simply by folding the bottom
edge up into the dress 1 inch and sewing across.
And that’s how I copied this dress.
So - let’s compare the two!
[music plays]
So that's it! That’s how I reverse-engineered a pattern and made a copy of a dress!
So they're basically the same - there's some minor differences in that I sewed the triangle
section a bit too far down, but because this was the trickiest part of this project, I
really didn't want to redo it, and I think it looks fine so I'm going to leave it as-is.
The back of the collar could also look a bit neater, but that's something I can improve
on next time.
[Now go forth and duplicate your own favourite dresses, in all different fabrics!]
I hope this video was helpful -- if you try it out then don't forget to tag me on instagram
so I can see your results - just tag it with #diyannika. Give this video a thumbs up if
you enjoyed it and I'll see you all next time. Bye!