I made a dress from a tablecloth. Really!
I’m inspired by a variety of sewing YouTubers like Rachel Maksy and Micarah Tewers who do things like this and I wanted to try it.
It’s crazy what you can learn from the internet these days!
I got a red and white tablecloth made of a heavy cotton fabric from our local Arc store.
I traced a dress from my closet onto the folded fabric so I got two pieces of everything I traced and cut.
Once I had all the pieces cut I started by pinning the skirt together and sewing the long seams. I don’t really have a functioning sewing machine so I did this entire project by hand.
I did run into one problem with this method. The tablecloth wasn’t quite wide enough to trace the whole skirt and it came out a bit narrower than I wanted. Once all the pieces were cut out I found I had a triangle the exact length of the skirt left over so I cut the front piece in half and sewed the triangle in there to give it more fullness.
In the middle of this project a friend gave me a dress form. The Best Gift Ever! It’s much easier to pin sleeves and darts on the form than on myself.
I didn’t have enough fabric left to make long sleeves; there was just enough to make square draping cap sleeves.
It took a little studying to figure out how to finish it. It needed neck facing and the seams needed to be finished. I did all that and then realized that my back darts didn’t work at all!
How did I solve the problem? Thanks to YouTube, I learned to do a “swayback adjustment”, which is basically a horizontal dart. It worked, but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get into the otherwise-finished dress if I really fitted it, so I took the last bit of tablecloth and made a belt.
It worked and I was actually able to wear the dress to work!
