Altering A New Dress

I bought this new dress from Shein.com. It looked super cute online. Of course the model is probably a lot taller than my 5'4" height. I knew it may be too long but it was more than too long. It was also too big in the sleeves and just wasn't fitting right. Let me show you a comparison:

Modeling wearing dress on Shein.com

Me in the same dress :(

I couldn't return it because shipping it back to NJ was going to cost as much as the dress! Next time I will know to order smaller.

So I got to measuring and then pinning. I put the dress on my dress form and pulled the hem up and pinned it. I planned to cut off the extra after sewing it, that way I could make sure it was the length I wanted it in case I needed to redo it. I would later regret this decision.

This will turn out to be a bad idea.

Then I hemmed it. I tried it on and its all good so I cut the excess length off. I tried to be very careful not to snip any of the dress while doing so BUT oooooops! I was sooo sad to find I had made an accidental tiny snip at the bottom of the front of my dress just above the hem. You can sort of see it in this pic:

Can you see that little tiny snip? GAHHH!!!!

If only it had happened on the back of the dress I wouldn't have been so mad at myself! I did have a solution but it wasn't a perfect one. Almost! But not quite.

I cut out a tiny piece of path and ironed it to the back of the snip. You can't see the snip from the front but you can see a circular shape if you are looking for it. Oh well. Reason learned I guess. Anyway heres how my hem looked after cutting it off. I couldn't use my pinking shears to cut this material so hopefully it doesn't fray.

So next up was the sleeves. Im not going to try to make them tighter but I did make them smaller. I thought about removing the cuffs and resewing them on but when I tried to pick out the thread it would snag the material so I abandoned that idea and just did a normal hem.

Not too difficult of a refashion. Actually this may be more of an alteration than a refashion. So its not exactly my dream dress but it is a lot better than before. Im still thinking about taking it in on the sides but I haven't decided yet. It IS still a bit too big in the waist and on top.