Off The Shoulder Dress

One day not long ago, I made plans to go to the movies but ‘I had nothing to wear.’ Sure there buddy, you really have nothing to wear? Classic stuff lol. Anyways, since I had nothing to wear and didn’t feel like going out to buy anything , I decided to whip up this cute dress.  It was my first time making anything off-the-shoulder, so it took some staring at photos of similar outfits to figure it out. Trust me, I really had to study to make sure I didn’t screw this up, but turns out, it’s actually quite simple to do.

Here’s what I did: I self drafted the entire outfit using two other dresses to base the pattern on. After cutting my pieces, I altered the front and back of the dress by cutting about 6″ from the shoulder. Yep, I could have just cut it like this to begin with, but I didn’t feel like drawing up a new pattern…#lazy.

For the arm, after cutting the pattern pieces, I then cut the appropriate amount off the shoulder cap by measuring the pattern pieces against each other:

Then I joined the arm to the dress as per usual. At first, it didn’t look like it was going to fit or stay up at all around the shoulders, but once I finished it with a 1.5″ wide elastic, it was perfect!

I chose not to hem the bottom of the dress because…well…it was already short enough as is, and hemming it up would have made it shorter, so I opted to leave it as it. I thought it completed the casual look I was going for and ended up leaving the sleeves raw too.

All in all, this baby took only 2.5 hours to make, from start to finish. Not too shabby eh?

Shoes: Keds | Sunnies: H&M | Watch: Skagen
Photos by P. Maulkhan

Off The Shoulder Dress by Sweet Shard.