Black and White Striped Dress Refashion

I feel a little weird about posting a refashion like this considering it's still quite clearly winter outside, BUT, in my defense it has been an unseasonably warm winter by me.

... as in it's been in the high 20's, low 30's, which is like crazy warm for here. Shhh, just let me justify posting about crop tops in January.

But quite some time ago, like an embarrassingly long time ago, I was visiting Carolyn when her neighbor was getting rid of some old clothes and ended up gifting me this dress:

Now, you may be thinking-- Becca. That is a perfectly fine dress. Why would you mess with that?
While yes I agree it's a fine dress, it's just a little too short for my liking. As in, if I were to bend over, I might get charged with public indecency. And while I like to live life on the edge, I'm not that edgy so... yeah.

So, I finally turned it into not one, but two new things. Look at me go.

Here is what I did to turn this dress from too short to... some things that were still pretty short. (also, please excuse the amount of cat hair in these photos. I am a terrible disaster of a person.)

The first part of this refashion was really simple. All I did was lay my dress flat and chop off the bottom hunk in order to start turning this into a simple top.

Although this is a knit fabric and therefore doesn't fray, I still folded the hem up once and ran a zig-zag stitch all the way around it just to give it a bit more polish.

And just like that, this piece went from a too-short dress to a more acceptable length top. I didn't want to waste the extra fabric so I decided to take this refashion a step further (to be fair though, I never throw away any of my fabric scraps for environmental and crafty reasons that I can talk about at a later date maybe).

For part two, I started by taking the extra piece of fabric and cutting it in in half.

I then took those two pieces and pinned and sewed (again, zig-zag stitch) them together so that my top would have more length to it.

After measuring this piece against my body, I decided that it was just a bit too long, so I took off some of the length and hemmed my bottom edge the same way I did for my first top.

With right sides together, I folded the top in half, pinned the raw edges, and sewed the back of the top closed.

I then took the piece of fabric that I trimmed off earlier and chopped that piece in half again.

And then I folded each piece in half, pinned the edges, and sewed down the long edge. After sewing them down, I turned each piece right-side out in order to make my straps.

Finally, I sewed my straps on in the locations that seemed best and adjusted the length of the straps so that they were not too long or too short. I also did a tiny little pinch and gather at the front of the top but I forgot to photograph that part, so my bad.

But now I have a fun little crop top that is totally winter appropriate. I'm pretty jazzed about the way that the back looks at least. I could lie and say that I planned it that way, but we all know that I do not have that much sewing foresight. Ayyy, happy accidents.

For now I'll be stashing this away with the rest of my tanks, but hopefully I can get good use out of both of these new tops come summer time!


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