Fixing a tear in a dress

I mentioned on facebook on Thursday that I was planning to repair a dress ready to wear for the event on Saturday.

The dress I was talking about was this one:

Which I wrote about back here.

What you can’t see in that photograph is the little repair job on the armhole that had been done not too well:

I unpicked the stitching to reveal this:

Which doesn’t look too bad until you look from this angle

Fortunately the dress came with a belt made of the same fabric that I could use to fix it.

Now you might assume that as I sew (a lot) I wouldn’t have a problem fixing a tear in a dress. But I had no idea of how to fix a tear like this so that it wouldn’t look like I’d just sewn a patch on!  I’ve patched jeans before but that’s never needed to be a tidy patch and the last pair I did for Bethan she chose a pretty print which shows through.  So I had a quick browse around and found a useful step by step guide on Martha Stewarts site here.  It looked simple but also meant that I had to make the damaged area bigger to fix it tidily.  It didn’t take too long but it was quite fiddly.

So this is what it looked like when I’d finished:

Part of the fix is on the facing of the dress so what is on the outside is this:

And unless you are eagle eyed I don’t think you would notice.  So I wore it yesterday at the vintage fair and received lots of lovely compliments on it, but of course I then couldn’t resist telling people that it only cost £3.00 from the charity shop!  It felt like it fitted much better than it did when I first got it back in the summer so I’m also delighting in the fact that I might now be slimmer!

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