In my first entry I wrote about one of my biggest passions, dresses! I can’t get enough of them! I wouldn’t say I have too many, because you can’t really have too many dresses, but I have a few. Most of my dresses are vintage finds or thrifted. I’m not the kind of girl who go for design pieces, I couldn’t afford it and I believe you can dress great without spending too much money! This is where this tutorial get’s in the picture. If you haven’t read my first entry about the dress off my dreams from asos, do it here.
So I was in an impossible position, the dress I had my eyes on was way to pricey and when it came on sale it still was too much for my student budget to bare. And then it got sold out. What do you do? You do it yourself! It was a little tricky but I would like to think that my version, all though MUCH cheaper, is just as good as the one from asos.
Since my dress was too white for my taste I used tea to dye it a more antique white shade. Here is a tutorial for that. But let’s skip to how I turned my plain dress into a wonder of flower power! It was more work than I expected, but I had some fantastic assistance from my mother who is way more handy with a needle and thread then I’ll ever be!
This is what you’ll need for this project
- a simple dress to your liking
- lots of iron on flowers
- lots of sew on flowers
- needles and thread
- an iron
The flowers I bought I bought on ebay, here, here and here. If I were to buy all the flowers in a craft or sewing store I could just as well’ve bought the original asos dress, they’re that expensive, so i recommend shopping from ebay for this purpose. I think I had about 150 flowers all in all, but some are large and some are tiny, buy as many as you think you’ll need and want. Personally I think more is more (always)!
I started by putting the dress on and trying to figure out where the flowers would be most flattering and look the best together. Since I wanted my dress to be symmetrical, like the asos dress, I put needles in the fabric (while wearing it) to know where I should put the flowers later on. I lay the dress out and started needling the flowers on.
I wanted the lining to be eye-catching so I chose to place the larger flowers there. I saved matching ones for the back.
Only my larger flowers were the iron on kind so they were the only ones I fit into the symmetrical pattern. The small ones had to wait! When I was satisfied with flowers placements I started ironing them on. Remember to take the needle away before placing the iron on the flowers and be very careful with the heat if you dress i lace, like mine.
Ones the flowers are stuck, it can take a while for the glue to set so just keep ironing, it’s time for the tiny flowers. If it was one thing I loved with the asos dress it was that they had sewn flowers on top of each other, so I sewed many of my smaller ones on top of the larger flowers. It takes a good while to sew on all the smaller ones, but don’t give up because the more flowers the more amazing your dress will look.
Before I sewed the smallest flowers on it looked like this!
And this is the finished product, of some weird reason I haven’t got any pictures with me actually wearing it. Next time I throw this beauty on I promise to snap I few pics!
This is how the back turned out, a little bit more bare like I wanted it. My favorite part, except the neckline, is the flowers on the bottom of the dress, the ones that went on the actual skirt. Such a special little detail.
When I wore this I got so many compliments from my friends and I bet you would to if you made your own version!
curlycrafter 