Dress Alteration

A few months ago, maybe mid-December, I went to JCPenney's to do some dress shopping.  I probably tried on 30 or so dresses because I went in with low expectations.  I was sure I was only going to be able to find something that needed some kind of alteration.  Well, I found three dresses that looked good on me and (probably) wouldn't need any alterations to make them work.  Unfortunately I only had the budget for two, so the one you see here is the one I didn't get.

Fast forward a month or so and I was at Penney's again. I decided to stop by the dress section and I found that third dress on clearance for $14.  By that time I had $14 in my budget for a new dress so I scooped it up.

While trying it on it felt like it was going to be long enough but the first time I wore it it felt just a little too short.  So I decided to lengthen it.  The original hem used that fancy stitch (I can never remember what it is called) that doesn't actually show the stitching and I don't remember how to do that and I didn't want to figure out how to do that plus everywhere else on the dress had a little black lining, so I decided to finish the hem with a similar black lining.  And it was easy.  Here's what I did.

Step 1 - Take out the hem.

Step 2 - Do some measuring. I measured the width of the black lining on the other parts of the dress (about 1/4 inch) and of the stitching at the hem (also about 1/4 inch).  This led me to believe that I would need at least a full inch of fabric for my lining: 1/4 inch on each side to match the lining and hide the stitching + 1/4 inch on each side for a seam allowance.

Side note: I actually used about 1 1/4 inch fabric just to be sure.

Step 3 - Cut and iron the fabric.  Once I had a long strip of black fabric, long enough to go all the way around the bottom of the dress, I ironed it.  If you are a talented enough sewer, you could probably skip all or part of this step but I'm going to say what I did even if it wasn't necessary.  I started by ironing the strip in half width ways.  After that, I folded the outer sides into my new crease and folded them down.  That is all.

Step 4 - Pin and sew.  I started by laying the black fabric so that the ends that were sewn to the middle were on top.  I then placed my dress hem on top - right side up (this means the dress was inside out and the inside of the dress was toward the black fabric's ends).  Then I pinned.  Then I sewed.  To finish the ends together I did it kind of like I do the binding on a quilt - when I got close, I sewed the two ends together so the black strip was one big circle, then just finished sewing the strip onto the skirt hem.

As you can see in the last image, I got about 1 1/2 inches of extra length on the dress, so it should be perfect now!