I recently created a Stylenanda inspired floral dress and I'll be showing a tutorial below on how to make it yourself! This is my first DIY dress so some bits may be dodgy or unprofessional -you can just create or change some parts, but yeah I just improvised when I was making this. Sorry for the extremely blurry and bad-quality/lighting pictures as I used my phone camera (I was too lazy to get the camera).
Firstly you'll need: fabric scissors, a ruler, pins, newspaper/dot paper, 1m of fabric, pen, a shirt and an invisible zipper.
(I just used newspaper for my pattern piece since I don't have dot/tracing paper) Take your shirt and trace around it but only the armholes (not around the sleeves).
This is what your pattern should look like. (Not sure why I hadn't finished tracing the other armhole yet.)
On the FRONT piece you will need to trace the lower neck line (where the red dotted line is) and the red dash line is where you will need to cut in half.
Using the ruler, extend the sides of the pattern/shirt about 20-25 cms or however much longer you want, for the length of the dress (the yellow lines -not to scale). You will also need to add a 1cm seam allowance around the dress, so basically like a border around your whole pattern 1cm wide (look at the picture below). Yeah, I also don't know why I didn't take a photo of doing that.
Cut out the pattern (along the half line -red dashed line) and you should end up with 2 pieces.
Place the patterns onto your fabric like so -with the patterns on fold and then go ahead and pin it.
After cutting them out, this is what you should have.
Place the fabrics on top of each other as shown -right sides of the fabric together.
Pin the shoulder parts together.
Sew the shoulder parts together (I sewed on the first line).
After sewing the shoulders, pin the sides of your dress like so and then just go ahead and sew it together.
After sewing, when you flip you dress back to the right side, this is what you dress should look like!
You will notice that the edges around the neck are frayed so just fold in about a few cms and just sew around the neck.
This is when I folded and sewed around the neck once.
I had to fold and sew it twice because you could still see the frayed edges. I realised after that I could have just overlocked the edges and fold it once. You will also need to repeat these steps for the armholes and the end of the dress.
Take your invisible zipper and place it in the middle to measure out how much you will need to cut. Cut out a straight line that should fit the zipper. (I think I didn't do this part properly because I cut the fabric after instead of doing it in the pattern?)
Place the invisible zipper into the slit (right on the edge) and pin the zipper onto the fabric. Hand sew the zipper as shown. After hand sewing, go ahead and machine sew it with a zipper foot.
The invisible zipper after sewn.
Now for the sleeves I first did mesh sleeves but decided I probably wouldn't wear the mesh sleeves because it looked a bit too fancy! So I changed it and just used the same floral fabric to make sleeves. I'll show below the 2 different methods anyway.
Mesh/tulle sleeves:
The tulle/mesh I used was just taken from a tutu skirt that I own so I basically just pinned and sewed it onto the armholes.
So yeah, this is what it looked like in the end. I actually really liked it and it looked unique but I wanted to wear this dress often so I had to take down the sleeves and change it :( I also forgot to take photos of what the dress looked like worn!
Floral Fabric Sleeves:
Using the same shirt, create a pattern by tracing around the sleeve and armhole. Again, you will need a 1cm seam allowance around the pattern as shown.
Cut out the pattern and pin the pattern onto the spare fabric with the long side (as shown) on fold. Overlock the around the whole sleeve fabric. Repeat this step as you will need 2 sleeves.
Fold the sleeve in half again, with right sides together and sew along the dotted line. After sewing your sleeve should look like the picture on the right.
Since I overlocked the sleeve this time, I only had to fold the ends of the sleeve once and sew it. Pin the sleeves first and then sew it.
Now you will need to sew the sleeves onto the dress so taking the bottom of the sleeve and the side/lower armhole of the dress, line them up and MAKE SURE THE LINES ARE MATCHING (like when you flip the dress to the right side, the line of the sleeve is matching the line to the side of the dress) and then pin along the whole armhole.
I sewed the sleeves onto the seam so that it would be covered and the thread would not show on the outside. After sewing both sleeves the dress should be complete!
What the dress looked like worn:
Thanks for reading! If there is something you don't understand you can just leave a message. :)
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