DIY: A "No Sew" Dress Refashion!

No sew refashions are way boring. In trying not to bore you to death, I try to find clothing items that take at least some sewing or a couple of steps of transformation.

But...

I found this very cute dress for $0.50:

I'm working barefoot today.

 You're wondering what I'm going to do to this dress, aren't you? I mean, it's not hideous. It fits pretty well. The length is perfect. So, how am I going to refashion this, you ask. Well, first of all...

I need a closer shot. I don't think you quite understand...

FAKE JEWELS!!!!!!

These fake jewels at the neckline really make this dress look dated and cheap (as far as I'm concerned). The dress is the kind of dress that could easily be dressed up or down, depending on what kind of accessories it's paired with. It's also the perfect blank canvas type of dress that one could wear, styled lots of different ways, and no one would know that it's the same dress.

The only problem: those fake jewels at the neckline.

Well, there's another problem, too:

I'm like a T-rex. My arms just aren't long enough.

I can only wear this dress if someone else zips me in and out of me. Hahah... I'm kidding, that's not much of a problem. The other problem, for real this time:

Massive amounts of pilling.

The material of this dress is kind of sweater-like. It's thick and it has a tendency to pill.

So, those are my 2 issues with this otherwise wearable dress. This refashion is going to fly by!

First, I need to get rid of the offending jewels.

So easy.

And even though I was not a fan of the jewels on this dress, I thought I might like them for some other project...

Gotta love little snack baggies!

... so, I saved them for future use.

That takes care of the jewel portion of the dress, onto the pilling. Once upon a time, I owned a sweater shaver thingy but I broke it a long time ago and never replaced it. Oh well, I'd have to make due with something I had on hand:

A cheapy disposable razor!

This ended up working pretty well, but there were a lot of pilly areas, so it took a little while.

After I was done, I popped the dress into the washer/dryer, just to get rid of whatever little pilly parts might still be stuck on. I was left with this:

Decided to go for a different background for once! Too bad it's blurry though!

I am too lazy to re-do my picture into something better, which really sucks because all the "after" pictures were either blurry (see above) or just really terrible in general (see below)

At least the room is clean.

Anyway, you get the idea. The jewels are gone. The pills are gone. I'm left with a comfortable, nice fitting, pretty versatile dress. I didn't style it up too much because I didn't want to overwhelm the "after" shot like I usually do!

To tell the truth, I almost didn't get the dress because of the off-putting bejeweled neckline until I realized it was a pretty simple fix. So, this post just proves that you don't need a sewing machine or all that much creativity in order to take something from "not something you'd wear" over to "something you'd love to wear!"

Mehhh.. Hardly looks like I did anything in pictures, but it's quite noticeable in person.