3 Quick and Easy Ways to Alter a Dress​

If you’re not an expert sewist, it can be a challenge to alter a dress to fit you properly.

Here we have three fashion hacks to help you. Two of them need no sewing at all and you can do the third quickly by hand with a simple running stitch.

Tools and materials: 

• Bangle
• Hair tie
• 2 safety pins
• Piece of lace, ribbon or elastic
• Fabric marker
• Hand sewing needle and thread

We’ve used the same dress each time. It’s a simple design with waist darts at the back. It’s looser than we like, but not super-baggy.

1. Bangle tie

It’s useful to have someone to help you with this temporary fix. You’ll need a bangle and a large hair tie.

Put your dress on with the wrong side out and close it as normal.

Ask your friend to place the bangle underneath your dress, centrally and at waist height. 

Holding the bangle in one hand, she needs to wrap the hair tie firmly around the fabric between the bangle and your skin.

This is how it looks on the outside (the wrong side).

Now put your dress on the right way around.

The bangle makes such an interesting detail at the back!

2. Safety pin save

You’ll need to phone a friend for this one, too!

You need a good length of lace, ribbon or elastic and two safety pins.

Put your dress on inside out again and close it.

You’re going to be using the waist darts for this method. It’s more difficult to do on a dress that doesn’t have them.

Your friend is going to close the safety pins vertically through each dart, so the pins don’t show on the right side.

Then thread the ribbon - or whatever you’re using - through both the pins.

Leave equal ends on both sides.

Now she needs to pull the ends of the ribbon to bring the darts together until the dress fits as you want it to, then tie the ends firmly in a bow.

We’d suggest you use a ribbon color that matches the dress. We used a dark one so you could see it more clearly against the white dress.

This doesn’t give quite such a good result from the back, but it’s comfortable to wear.

3. Side seam taper

This last method is semi-permanent and the most professional of the three.

Wear your dress inside out and pinch the side seams where you want it to be tighter.

You could probably do this one on your own but having a friend makes it much easier.

Ask your friend to draw in the new side seams with a fabric marker, making sure they’re even on both sides.

Take the dress off and taper the top and bottom of the new shape into the existing seams.

Thread a hand sewing needle with thread and knot the end.

With your dress still wrong side out, sew a straight (running) stitch on through both layers of fabric on each side, following the marked line.

The new section of seam should be curved like this.

When you wear your dress, there'll be no sign of your adjustments at the front or the back.

How to alter a dress

So there you have it! Three ways to alter a dress to fit you, two temporary and one that could be permanent.

You can use a sewing machine for the last one if you find it easier than hand sewing.

Let us know which method you’re going to try in the comments.