Flirty Garden Party Dress Reconstruction

While cleaning out my parents' garage, I found a box of my old childhood clothes, including this little number.

Yikes.

Hello, 90's.
Hello, evidence of my awkward phase.
Hello, potential.

Challenge: accepted!

This tutorial will show you how I modernized this train-wreck, and how you can make your own dress flirty and feminine and dare I say sexy?

Don't be scared; Scissors are fun.

Puffy sleeves: gone.
Scalloped-gingham trim: outta here.
4 inches from the bottom of the dress: bye-bye.

This alone would have been enough to update the dress, but let's go further.

Let's bring sexy back. To my back.

Turn the dress inside out and have the back of it face you.

Color-coding time!

Using a blue pencil, I drew my seam allowance.

Using a red pencil, I drew the part of the pack I wanted to cut out. Honestly, I just eye-balled it.
The size of this hole can be drawn smaller depending on how much skin you want or don't want to show.

Carefully cut out on the red line.

Be sure not to cut the front of the dress while you are doing so.
That's just silly.

The cutting is done; now we fold and pin our edges to prepare for sewing.
This means the dress's bottom hem, sleeves, and back cut-out.

Fold and pin! Like a boss.

Take the dress to the machine, and work that top-stitch! Once again, like a boss.

This project was so simple, it took me less than a day to finish, and now I have a flirty dress instead of a reminder of how sad I must have looked in grade school!