I’d Rather DIY Ep. 1: Making a Dress from one 2 Sizes Too Small

Today I'm turning a dress that's way too small for me, into a pattern and a dress that fits! Follow along with the video above, or read the blog post below.

Welcome back to the studio! Today, I'm excited to kick off a brand new series called 'I'd Rather DIY'. In this series, I'll take garments I'm not quite ready to part with and put my own spin on them to bring them back to life.

Today I tackled a gorgeous red dress from Mink Pink. It needed a bit of tweaking to fit just right. Let's dive into the transformation process!

Firstly, I mapped out the dress's panel pieces, using tools like a pattern wheel and French curve. With my bunny, Peppa, lending a curious paw, I marked and adjusted for darts—those essential shaping seams.

Then came grading the pattern. Since the original dress was two sizes too small, I had to add extra width strategically. Dividing the garment into quarters, I meticulously adjusted each section, ensuring proportional growth.

With the pattern perfected, it was time to select fabric. Though my initial choice fell short, I pivoted to a vibrant green rayon, a personal favourite. After cutting out all the pieces, I meticulously stitched them together, ironing darts and seams for a polished finish.

The dress truly took shape as I attached straps and waist ties, adding playful details to elevate the design. A final touch of finesse came with the rolled hem, lending a professional edge to the ensemble.

The end result? A bespoke creation that turned earned me some compliments when I debuted her at a wedding. Mission accoumplished!

Supplies used:

Pattern wheel: https://amzn.to/3AEYnOV French curve set (includes a pattern wheel): https://amzn.to/3hR3enB

​​Full Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Carley, welcome back to my studio.

As promised, today's video is going to be the first in my brand new series called 'I'd Rather DIY', where I take a piece of clothing I like and I make it myself. And I always like to make it just a little bit different from the original so it's not a direct copy. Today, I'm going to be showing you how I made this dress from this dress, and this dress was actually 2 sizes too small for me so I'm actually going to show you how I grade it to make it fit me as well. Anyways, let's get on with the video.

So the first piece I thought I'd have a go at doing this with is this really cute red dress. It's from Mink Pink and it's a wrap dress so at the moment it's not tied up at all. Okay... So as you can see, this dress would be really cute but... not a lot of coverage, so I'm going to have to make this pattern a bit wider around here and because it crosses over at the moment it would be showing way too much leg, so I'm just going to try and make a pattern out of this and sew it up, so let's get started.

So I'm going to jump in here and explain exactly what it is I'm doing, first of all I started marking out the panel pieces of the dress just as they were. This tool I'm using is called a pattern wheel, I'll leave a link below where you can find one yourself. And here's Peppa trying to help me, so I just moved her out of the way... She always butts her head up against my hand like that when she wants to be patted. Anyway, here I think I'm marking the dart which you can barely see but if you don't know what a dart is, it's where you kind of sew away a piece of the pattern so it's shaped, usually around the bust and the hips are where you'll find darts.

Here I'm pivoting the dart because that part of the fabric is sewn away, I have to make allowance for that.

So after I've traced around all of my pattern pieces, I'm just lightly going over the little holes that the pattern wheel makes in the paper so that I can see them there with the pencil and then just going over them properly with a thicker line, and then using the ruler to also measure out those edges of the pattern pieces and make sure they're all even.

Here you can see I'm just measuring the lengths of the edges of the actual dress compared to my pattern to make sure I've drawn it accurately, and always remember to label your pattern pieces so you know what goes where.

The tool I'm using here to draw my curves is called a French Curve, I will leave a link for that in the description as well.

And I'm just cutting out all my pattern pieces without seam allowance for now because I'm going to grade them before I go ahead and add seam allowance.

For any pattern pieces that I can I've also made them on the fold so the back top and the back skirt are the same on both sides, they're symmetrical so I've just made half of the pattern for now.

This mark is used to define the edge of a pattern piece that is cut on the fold so that you know if you are cutting it out of fabric, that's where you'll fold your fabric in half and line up that edge.

Now I'm putting all the edges of my pattern pieces together to make sure when the garment gets sewn together that there's no edges that are longer or shorter than each other, and it's all going to work together.

Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to mark out the lines where I'm going to cut and spread my pattern. Now this is a method I'm going to explain to you a little bit here, but basically when you have a garment that's a smaller size, you want to cut and spread it to make it bigger, so that the proportions of the garment are basically the same but you're making it fit your body.

Most sizes in women's sizing vary by 5cm around the hips bust and waist, when you go up or down a size it should be 5cm around the waist for example.

In this case my body is two sizes bigger than the size I made the pattern sample of, so that means I need to add 10cm around waist, hip and bust area roughly. And the best way to make sure that is spread evenly around the different parts of my body is by splitting the body into four quarters. The four quarters are our front left and right and our back left and right. So let's just focus on one piece as an example, I'm going to look at my back top piece and if I fold it in half we'll look at it as if it's the back left piece.

Before you get started make sure your pattern piece that you're about to use has no seam allowance, or trace it out and then take off the seam allowance.

If I need to add 10cm to my bust, which is a horizontal line across my pattern piece, and I'm dividing that amongst the four quarters, then I only have to add 2.5cm to this piece. I'm going to measure out some lines equidistant on my pattern piece, let's say I'm going to split it in five places because that makes it easy for me to add 0.5cm or 5mm in each of those spaces.

Now if I cut and spread my pattern, adding those 5mm extra in between each line, make sure it's even at the top and the bottom. Now I'm creating a new pattern piece that is a bit wider than the original.

Now I'm just adding my seam allowance back on, and of course when I open this pattern piece out it will be the full back so in total I will have added 5cm to the back, and you'd do the same for the front sides as well.

As you can here when I put the old pattern over the new pattern, the pattern's been stretched horizontally without losing the proportions.

And in this example I've given today, this is a very basic look at how grading works and it works for your bust and your waist and hip measurements here but in other cases you might also want to lengthen a dress or add some to the height rather than just the width, and I will probably be able to go over that in another video but I hope that helps you understand for now how I've graded this dress to fit me today .

So I've finished my pattern and I've just gone to cut it out of the fabric I was going to use but unfortunately, I don't think I have enough of my first choice, but I do have a lot of this fabric which is still rayon fabric it still drapes the same, it's still a really nice fabric to use. And this is actually my favourite print that I've gotten in this colour, I made a lot of scrunchies out of this. And I've been really wanting some green clothing so I'm actually going to make the dress out of this instead and I think I actually like this option better.

I'm going to cut my patterns out of this now. I completely forgot to allow for seam allowance on this one so that's why I have sticky-taped this 1cm strip of paper to the side. What you can see here is the grid I used to line up my pattern piece for the grading. I'm thinking I should do a full video on how I grade my patterns because it can be really useful if you are using patterns that arent your size or if you are copying clothes that arent your size like I am today.

so here I'm just recycling the pattern piece I used to help me grade the pattern, this is a throw-away piece now anyway so I just used it to help me cut out some even stirps of binding which I'm going to be using to help me bind the edges of the dress.

And this is called tear-away, this is actually a roll of fusing where the sticky side kind of disappeared over time, so I use it as tear-away, and what I do with that is sew it onto my curved edges so that it doesn't stretch while I'm sewing it, you can see here I'm pulling it and it doesn't stretch like it normally would on a curve (or on the bias) and after I've sewn on my binding I'm going to be tearing off that white bit and it will leave me with a nice neat edge.

I've also just sewn my bust darts and now I'm just pressing them, normally I would press them on my tailors-ham which I'm sure I've shown you in a video before but I couldn't find it when I made this video so I'm just using the arm of my mannequin. And there's Peppa hanging out under my sewing table keeping me company.

So this is the skirt all put together, now I'm just overclocking the side seams and I'm just going to also roll the hem with my rolled hem foot for my Bernina sewing machine. This was a bit tricky around the curves but it makes a really nice, neat, skinny little hem along the edge.

Now I needed quite a bit of binding for the top because it has straps on the shoulders that tie together and then it also has the waist tie. I am just attaching some of the pieces of binding together and then attaching them to the dress with enough left at the end to turn into my ties. Once I have done one seam to attach the binding to the edge of the top I'm able to tear off that tearaway and then i fold it to the inside to sew an inside bind and that just means instead o the biding sitting on te outside of the hem you actually fold it to the inside so all you can see is a line of stitching but it all looks like the same piece of fabric.

Now at least one of my shoulders is complete and I'm just tying them together to see how it looks, and then I just had to fix up a few bits around the top and make sure all of the edges were bound before I attach the top to the skirt. And I think she's just about done here so let's have a look at what it looks like on!

So there you go, that is how I made this dress. I actually wore it to a wedding recently and got lots of compliments. If you did make it all the way to the end of this video please leave a green emoji in the comments so I know who you are and I can thank you personally. And if you did enjoy this video please give it a like and subscribe to my channel, I put out new videos every Friday, and I will see you in the next one! Bye!