The Problem With Buttons.

I saw this dress in my local charity shop the other day and I couldn't resist it.  Despite it being a little shorter than I tend to go for (it stops just above my knee) it was love at first sight; the print is a teeny tiny leaf and berry affair, it's in remarkably good condition bar a few threads here and there and it has pockets. All for the grand price of £3.  I snapped it up straight away and raced it home to try it on.  Cue problems.

I am not an especially busty girl but this happens much more frequently than I'd like.  I find something pretty in my size and when I try it on, it strains at the chest and this weird, unsightly gap thing emerges.  Usually I have a bit of a sulk when this happens, vow to lose some weight so that it fits better and whatever I've bought tends to end up stuffed in the back of a drawer and forgotten about.  But not this time; not only do I really like this dress, I'd also planned to wear it for a little outing next week (yay cocktails!) so I needed to feel comfortable in it and address this 'gaping issue'.  Google searches told me that sewing the gap shut was the best option, so I got out a needle and thread and went for it.

The first thing I did was figure out how much of the join I'd have to stitch closed (which equated to about three buttons in length) and when it was buttoned, that I was able to put the dress on and take it off again.  There's no use stitching it closed if you can't then wear it!  Then I got to work.

I had a natural starting point as there was a seam just under the bust area, so I carefully lined up the two parts with the buttons done up, lining the edge of the 'buttonhole side' to where it meets the 'button side' and started sewing with little stitches in black thread (the base colour of my dress).  If you're a whizz with a sewing machine, you probably could do this in ten seconds, but as I am not it took me a good twenty minutes to hand sew it.  Well, twenty minutes, plus time getting Gizmo off of my dress and onto my lap, and then giving her lots of cuddles and pets.

Once I had meticulously (because I am slow at sewing) stitched it all together, up to the point it needed to be stitched, I messily knotted it off at the back and trimmed the excess thread.  This is what it looked like after I had sewn the two parts together:

So looking at this picture, the bottom line of stitches are the ones I did, sewing the right side of the dress over the left (and closing the gap) and as close to the edge of the material as I could.  Very basically, I sewed the gap in that earlier picture completely shut, as neatly as possible.  And then I tried it on again.

As you can see, the gap has been completely closed and the fabric now lies flat instead of it pulling where it was buttoned.  Yay!  Even for a novice like me, this sewing was pretty easy and the gratification of knowing I could now wear this without it gaping was immense.  I thought it might turn out feeling really tight and uncomfortable, and while it's a little trickier to get on now, it fits really comfortably.  I'm so pleased I managed to fix it, and unless you look really closely you can't even tell where the fix is.  Roll on cocktail outing and cute dress wearing!

Love, K.