The Target black dress transformation

I love little black dresses! so when I saw this long XL dress for only $7.00 at Target I knew I had to transform it! But since all dresses are different I decided not to make a tutorial of how I made mine, but explain what lead me to decide what would be the better way to transform it, to fit the shape and size I wanted. First let me show you the dress I started working with:

As you can see it was very long, with sleeves and a low waist line. What I had in mind was a short, sleeveless and a below breast kind of line. (that makes me look not so tall) Even tho the sleeves were very pretty, I rather not wear sleeves at all in the summer, the fact the dress is black is enough to make me sweat hehe.

My other problem with this dress just the way it was is that my little ladies were pretty much hanging out with such a low waistline and the kind of cross over this dress had in the front. NOT good!

So what I decided to do, since I wanted to sew as less as possible because this was a very stretchy fabric, was that I cut the sleeves off, then I cut from the center side down to the waistline on both sides. to then joint in the front. that way I didn't need to cut the back to bring the waistline up.

After that I cut the front fabric excess, and measure so my boobs will be fully covered. I also cut the dress to be a little above my knee height and use the extra fabric to create a binding around the shoulders. If you are following along you might wonder what happened with the back because it's longer than the front! To fix that I used a strap of fabric and sewed a little loop so the back is all gather and got brought up to the right height =]

And here is the after:

Here you can see a lot better what i meant with the loop in the back to fix the extra fabric problem. and this also makes it better for me because my back get's more air =]

Ken took the below pictures this weekend but we kind of forgot to take more pictures of me wearing the dress, duh! At least I got one of me and Curly!

I hope this inspires you to see the potential of some pieces in the sale section =] a cute little black dress for $7.00 it's a good deal, according to my wallet =]