An Easy Alteration To an Amazon Dress

 

Remember the teenager's end of the school year ballerina murder mystery party? One of the reasons why it was so fun is that it was not just a murder mystery, but ALSO a pretend high school Homecoming dance! 

Which means pretend high school Homecoming dance clothes!

This was, quite honestly, quite a lot of the appeal of the party for my own high schooler, since she's never been to a Homecoming dance... nor does she particularly desire to go to one, frankly, but dressing up and dancing with one's friends is SO fun.

Our local Goodwills do have a terrific selection of dresses, including plenty of beautiful formal ones, but dang, have they gotten spendy! Our local locations used the Covid lockdowns as an excuse to take away the monthly storewide sales, and when they reopened it was with higher prices and no more discounts, not even Color of the Week, grr. So even though I'm very much an advocate of thrifting and upcycling, I wasn't big sad when the teenager said she'd rather buy a cheap, fast-fashion, sweatshop-manufactured dress from Amazon. If it was gross, we could just return it and hit up Goodwill, after all.

The kid picked this one--

--and actually, it was pretty nice! The velvet and lace both looked good, the neckline had a well-constructed binding, the stretch fabric gave the garment good drape without needing darts (which means I didn't have to worry about misplaced darts), and the fact that it wasn't lined really just meant that I didn't have to work too hard on my alterations.

It definitely did need alterations, though. The length of the hemline and the sleeves were good, but the shoulders were way too long for my teenager's torso, and the waist was too roomy. We probably could have sized down, but the needed alterations were so easy that I could make them in less time than it would have taken to package up the return. 

For alterations this easy, I had the teenager put the dress on inside out, then I pinned the dress to fit the way she wanted it to.

I'm so glad I bought those plastic sewing clips that everyone was raving about on Tiktok!

I pinned the waist to fit, using the pins to mark my sewing lines and thereby skipping several traditional steps. Same for the shoulders, although I unpicked the top of the sleeve first:

To take in the garment, I just had to sew along the line my clips marked:

The sleeves were already slightly puffed, so I just regathered them to make them a little puffier, then pinned them and reset them into the shoulder. 

This was SUCH a quick alteration, and it really worked to show me that it's not the quality of the fabric that makes a garment look good, but the quality of the construction. The dress, pulled on straight from the package, looked okay, but it also looked as cheap as it was. But after doing nothing more than taking in the hems to fit my teenager's specific measurements, that cheap dress looked really good! It fit great, and therefore it looked great. 

A few weeks later, at my mending group's monthly afternoon when we sit in our public library and mend clothes for patrons, I used the same technique to alter a pair of work pants for a young adult who'd just started her first real white collar job. She'd purchased some khakis from Goodwill, but didn't like how wide the legs were. I had her put them on inside out, stood her on a stool, used my handy pins to narrow them the way she wanted, and then sewed along the pins. She tried them on again, and they looked great!

I'm telling you: easiest. Alteration. EVER!