it's kind welcome back to my channel today's video we are doing a so tutorial on this little evening gown I have another gown that's like this it also has a little mermaid bottom on each channel but that one I made out of tulle this one it's not as fluffy because I'm just using fabric to make the mermaid bottom so it's not gonna be as big and as dramatic as that one but I make up for it with this little shiny holographic sort of like shattered glass effect fabric I got it off of a online retailer that I found called coquetry clothing they sell fabrics but they also sell clothes which are like pre-made for you to buy and I saw a dress it looked just like this and it was like I want to try to make that on my own yet I didn't want to pay like the full price to have it pre-made I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could make it cuz it didn't really look not hard and it turned out pretty well if you want to see more like full body pictures of it check out my Instagram online kind where I'll be posting some pictures of it you're gonna want to have about 4 yards of this fabric honestly I could have just used 2 for this dress and that's how much I had originally but then I decided I wanted to add that little mermaid bottom which took me another 2 yards I'll show you what it looks like wavin without it like depending on how much fabric you want to use it was actually a really really easy garment to make I think between the sleeves and the top and the mermaid bottom if you've watched my other songs these are all things that I've done in other videos and I'm just putting them all together in one so if you want to see how I created this then just keep on watching okay so here's the fabric we're working with today it's this beautiful golden black shattered glass holographic effect and it's four-way stretch some stretch fabrics they're only two-way stretch if that's the case for you you can still do this you should just lay it down so that the stretch is sideways so that it stretches to fit your curves there's not much need for a vertical stretch here for this dress now we're gonna start off by making the sleeves I have a basic sleeve pattern that I traced firm from a sweater of mine and I pinned it onto fabric that's been folded twice so wants to give me a left and a right sleeve and again so that I can cut it on the fold and it'll be symmetric so once you cut it out you should have two symmetrical pieces as you can see I made the mistake of cutting too close to the edge that included some of the black trim that came with a fabric around the goal not that big of a deal though I just made sure that I hid that part inside the seams when I stitched it together so you'll see after I cut it out I folded it in half again and stitched along that edge making sure to cover up that bad part and you should have two nice identical sleeves I've seen some tutorials you know when they do a front half of the sleeve and a back half of the sleeve but since our fabric is stretch it doesn't really matter all that much so I keep my sleeve symmetrical just for simplicity's sake now we're gonna make the main body of the dress which is just gonna be a long front and back kind of tank top shape I folded the fabric right sides together about the approximate width of what I thought I needed and then I started tracing my bodysuit pattern but that I realize it would be wise did you just fold this in half again and cut it out on a fold just like I did for the sleeve so its symmetrical you might notice I extended the shoulders a little bit wider than my pattern just so that the sleeve seam would fall right on my shoulder because the bodysuit pattern that I have is more for a slim tank-top sleeve whereas I want this sleeve to go right to the end of my shoulder if you want to be sure for this you can measure out like the distance from your neck to your shoulder but I kind of just eyeballed it now instead of tracing the full bodysuit I did extend it down so that it would be a dress and you can kind of eyeball yourself an hourglass shape to play it safe I kind of just followed the width of my pattern all the way down in pretty much a straight line which you can always do and then I altered it later on in the video the length of this by the way is up to you you can make it floor length a knee length I initially made this hit the floor but later when I decided to add kind of a mermaid skirt I cut off around the knees of this so really I should have just stopped at the knees but when you cut this out you should get two symmetric pieces for the front in the back as I've done in my previous videos I'm gonna alter the neckline I tend to like a pretty low back so I can step into the dress without a zipper and but I will do separate tutorials in in the future because I realize I do this kind of a lot and at the front of my dresses I tend to like just a little bit below my collar bones not low enough to really like show too much of my chest I'm trying to be conservative okay when cutting your necklines always try to cut on the fold so it's symmetric if this is your first time try try to put it on and put a pin where you want your neckline just so you know how low to cut it because if you cut it too low there's really no repairing that now you can pin your two pieces together and sew a zig-zag stitch all the way along the shoulder seams and then from the armpits all the way down to the bottom so this is what I have now putting it on and because I use my body sleep pattern for the top half it fits pretty nicely I just need to alter it from my butt down and then with my sleeves you can kind of get an idea of how it can all come together but before we attach the sleeves you can see here in the mirror what the bottom looks like ignoring the fact that it's too long because that's easy to fix I also want to make it less straight looking I want to make it narrower at my waist and at my knees so that my butt looks a little bit bigger in comparison of course you can't make it too narrow because you do have to be able to walk around in it but that's why we use stretch fabric so I'm gonna take the dress in now a little bit at the waist and at the knees the trick is I wear the dress inside out and a mark out where my waist and hips are so I know how I'm on my hourglass figure to look that's what those little horizontal notches are and the way that I take in my dresses is I start by sewing right on top of the previous stitches that I just did so that the transition is seamless and where I want to taper it in words without hourglass figure I just push the dress in towards the machine so that the needle veers off of following the old path and narrows inwards and then I taper it out to get back onto the old path if the entire thing is too big you'll just be sewing a new line from the top to the bottom and the thing is you can repeat this iteratively tailoring it a little by little and then trying it on until you reach a point where if you go any skinnier you won't fit comfortably and when you're pleased with it you can just cut off the excess so that it's not bugging you when you put it on so now we're gonna install the sleeves and simply put you want to insert the sleeve while it's right-side out and the dress is inside-out line up the top of the sleeve where the shoulder is with the shoulder of the dress and line up the bottom with the armpit of the dress and pin these together just remember when you're pinning that the gold needs to be facing the gold so that it's right sides together and the armpit of your sleeve is facing the armpit of the dress now sometimes you can run into problems when your sleeve is way too big or the hole in the dress is way too big the first step is to try both of them on the way I just did and check if the dress is sleeve hole is too small and it's too pressed right up against your armpit maybe you can cut that a little bit bigger if it's too big and you can make it smaller you can do that when you do a lot of eyeballing like I do it's normal to get things that seem fine but when you want to pin them together they don't line up right and then you have a bunch of fabric that's just bunched up because it was too big with stretch fabric if I'm sewing two things together and one is too short and doesn't line up I I can actually pull on it so with that it meets the length of the longer one like I'll just stretch it as it goes under the needle which I'd rather do that then just bunch up the other fabric to make that shorter but I find that now that I'm tracing my patterns things tend to go a little bit easier because my patterns are all cut out so that they line up with each other so I get less problems down next I'm gonna hem the edges of the neckline which I've shown you plenty of times it's pretty simple I just fold it inwards and then pin to keep it in place and then run a zig zag stitch all the way around by the way I got a few questions about my sewing machine it's a singer 44:23 that I got on Amazon I don't know much about machines to really give you advice on what to buy but something I like about this is the detachable foot that allows me to sew sleeves and circular things that loop around the machine not sure maybe this is something every machine haves and I just think it's like super revolutionary but if not it could be something to keep in mind because it is a really useful feature I don't know what I do without it so you saw earlier with the bottom of the dress look like and you could stop here if you're happy with it and that would just be the most simplest kind of version of this dress but one last thing I'm gonna change is I didn't want to add a kind of circle skirt like mermaid tail I got another two yards of fabric I cut that in half and I'm gonna make two half disk shapes the idea is to make a fold donut shape with the smaller hole being for your legs to go through and the outer radius is just the size of it to make sure that it lines up with a dress I measured the hole at the bottom of my dress which by the way I cut off right around the knees I got twenty inches which I multiply by two to get 40 inches which is gonna be the total length around the bottom room of the dress so I need my inner donut circle to be the circumference so using the formula two PI R equals C we got that our radius is forty divided by six ish which is a little over six inches so we took my fabric I folded it in half and at the corner I'm measuring a circle of radius 6 which just means that your measuring tape is gonna be about six inches from the corner and then you just pivot around for the outer radius if you're okay with just using up the rest of your fabric which is what I did I would just cut it as large of a circle as you can but if you have to measure it take a measurement from your knee to the floor add a few inches for heels and then this is gonna be the length from the inner circle to the outer circle it doesn't really have to be super precise to be honest just cut that in a circle shape on the outside and the inside and you're gonna have a half a donut shape to create the other half just fold another piece of fabric the exact same way and trace what you just previously cut out if you want to make a little bit of a train out of it like I'm doing you're gonna make one and taper out a little bit longer as you can see here just make sure that the other end is gonna match perfectly with the first half that you're tracing because they do need to match up on at least one side so we can stitch them together you're gonna lay down you're to have donuts on top of each other with the right sides facing each other and then sew along the straight edge that connects them together and you should get a full doughnut shape if you trace both halves the same then it should just be a perfect donut if you tapered one longer like I did you'll have a front and a back so make sure you know which is which as you can see the seams are really clean and the skirt is just continuous because I made those side seams match if you want you can have the bottom of the dress like we did to the neckline but I'm not gonna do that and as you can see putting it on the circle shape when it's draped around either your hips or your knees it creates a kind of ruffling when it falls which is a really beautiful effect if you remember before the bottom of the dress was kind of just like a column like it was rectangular but this just gives a little bit more shape it moves nice and when I walk and you can use this exact method to make circle skirts ball gowns just by tweaking the size of that donut shape when attaching the skirt to your dress you want the front to line up with the front if your skirt has one and then you're gonna make sure that the side seams are also lined up just it was cleaner line them up right sides together try to picture like Marilyn Monroe with her dress blowing up over the vent the skirt should be flipped up inside out just like that when the dress is just right-side out I so does the exact stitch all along that 40 inch circumference and then tried it on to find it the skirt fell a little bit lower than I had wanted I personally like it to flare out above the knee versus below it makes for easier walking I think when I have some more knee room and I think the silhouette just looks nicer when the skirt is above the knee I should have planned it a little better and pinned exactly where I wanted it by lining it up in front of a mirror first but I just cut it out and sewed it back on higher and it concede the difference it really isn't that major I think it just looks a little bit better but this is what the finished gun looks like it was super easy and simple the Train is pretty subtle because I didn't have that much fabric to work with I'm pretty tall too but I love how it turned out you know with stretch fabric we don't really have boning or structure in this so it's important to have some body to fill this out and really make it look its best that's why I'm just so lucky to be a woman with curves this is the finished product you guys it turned out beautifully I love it especially the color I still can't get over it I think gold it's like one of the colors that suits me the best but then again I look good in every color so anyway thanks so much for watching you guys I hope you enjoyed this video and learned something cool today be sure to check out my Instagram and Twitter where I'm always active when I'm not here posting on YouTube as always I'll leave all the links and details down in the description so be sure to check that out and leave me a comment letting me know what you want to see me do next but until my next video I hope you guys are doing well and I'll see you all next time bye