However a nice wedding like this calls for a nice dress. I had sold most of mine off earlier in the year (we needed space and I never wore them) so I rushed about to find a dress. Unfortunately I wasn't really impressed with what the store had to offer. There was one dress on ebay that I did like, but the model they showed it on was very skinny, and the pictures I was able to find of larger girls wearing the dress were not very flattering. I didn't have any luck on Etsy either.
So my husband suggested I make my own dress.
Sadly, there aren't very many cute dress patterns for larger girls out there. While I knew I could size up a pattern to fit, I wasn't sure I wanted to bother with all that math and the mock ups to make sure everything fit properly. Time was ticking down and it was getting close to the wire when I remembered that I had seen a pattern on Pinterest for an Infinity dress.
I was first introduced to Infinity Dresses through David Tutera. He loves to use them as bridesmaid dresses on his show, My Fair Wedding, and they've become quite popular since then. They can sell for for as much as $200 (depending on the designer) but according to the link I saw on Pinterest, they seemed surprisingly easy to make. I decided to give it a shot.
I won't go into detail, because I'll be sharing links with instructions later in this post, but basically you cut out a circle skirt, a waistband, and then two straps that are about 10" wide (I had to go with 13"). You sew the straps and waistband to the skirt (supposedly you can do this with one seam) and then you can twist the straps around you to create various difference styles like so:
The boys, of course, were very willing to help me while I worked:
Once I was done I decided to wear it Kimono style:
.JPG)
Overall the dress was very easy to make and it turned out beautifully. The only problems I had with it were the fact that 1) I am too tall, so I had to cut out two halves of a circle skirt and then sew them together and 2) the waist did not want to stay at my waist. It had a habit of inching up towards my chest, so I had to keep tugging it down. Also, in order for it to be more bra friendly I had to make a tube top to wear underneath it.
Next time I'll probably make the skirt a little bigger - which should eliminate the problem with it climbing upwards. All the blogs I had read said you should cut it one to two inches smaller than your waist as the material often used for these dresses is very stretchy. However I figure you can always take it in by wrapping the straps around your waist. Also I would eliminate the waistband and just sew the skirt and the straps directly on to the tube top instead.
And last but not least, here are the tutorials I mentioned earlier:
No comments:
Post a Comment