An Awesome Alteration

A friend of mine bought this AMAZING vintage dress at the Goodwill fashion show a few weeks ago. She is planning on wearing it to my Zombie Prom Halloween party. The dress ended up being WAY smaller than the size listed, so I offered to alter it for her.

Luckily, being the vintage beauty that it is, this dress had tons of extra fabric in the skirt.

I cut a wedge from the side seam of the skirt to get the fabric to make the bodice larger. I sewed the seam back together and the volume of the skirt hid the new seam. The fabric will match but it is not going to have the black lace overlay. No worries, I have an idea for how to handle that later.

I decided to add the extra fabric to the back of the bodice right next to the zipper. Otherwise I would have been cutting through, and probably messing up, all those sequins. It means that the zipper wont be in the center of the back, but that isn't all that noticeable.

Here is the new panel sewn in place. The zipper is way over on the left side. It should fit, but that panel looks really noticeable.

So, I pulled out my sharpie marker and matched the lace pattern. I started by making small loops to replicate the netting pattern that is the background of the lace.

After the whole surface was covered in the net pattern, I made a larger flowery lace pattern.

Up close you can tell its not exactly the same.

But from arms length, and especially at night at a party, it's hard to tell that there is anything different. I showed it to my husband and he couldn't figure out that anything was different even up close.

I even drew some lines to match the gathered part of the skirt, but I didn't like how weird the seem looked.

So, I took a nod from the front of the dress and added a big bow. Now the dress should fit AND hopefully the changes won't be noticeable. Awesome!