Mumu dress--How to take apart and reuse a garment tutorial!

Mumu dress--How to take apart and reuse a garment tutorial!

• 7.14.2010

I do this a lot.  I cut apart garments and remake them into new things, which I see as a very eco-friendly and thrifty way to get new clothes!  I keep things out of the landfill, pay $1.19/lb for the pieces at Goodwill Outlet most of the time, and get to be creative and play around with patterns I might not otherwise use if I weren't a little constrained by the amount of fabric I have.  Some examples are my pants-dress and my men's shirt-dress, as well as the mumu I turned into a dress yesterday.

If you read my post yesterday, I told you about how I remade this mumu into a sundress.   There's the before, process, and after, although I also wanted to show you a little tutorial on how to do this yourself with a garment.

How about a tutorial?

• The first step in reusing a garment is disassembling it as much as possible.  This isn't always true, and if you're making over a tee into a tank top or something, you probably don't need to undo the side seams.  But for something like a mumu into a dress, or parachute pants into a skirt, you'll want to get the busy details of the original garment out of your way.  I started by cutting off the yoke and pockets, and the sleeves along the sleeve seam.

• Now, you'll take apart the big seams.  On vintage stuff, I've found often the thread is worn-out and old (and cotton), and will easily rip without hurting the fabric.  Test first, but you can probably snip the first few stitches, then tear!  Or, if you're not comfortable, use a seam ripper or small scissors.

• Press, press, press!  This is very important.  Make your pieces nice and flat, as if they were simply oddly-shaped brand new pieces of fabric.

• Lay the pieces out together, lining them up (you should have at least two symmetrical pieces, and I had four--two from the front, two from the back, that had been sew together at the centers).  Make sure to put them right sides together (or wrong sides together, whatever).  If you lay them on top of each other in sequence and cut out a pattern, you'll have two left or two right sides, rather than mirror images of each other.

• Lay out your pattern (all the pieces, making sure you have enough to do it all) and cut as you normally would.  You may have to get creative to make it all fit on the limited pieces you have!

• Hopefully you have enough for everything.  I laid it all out, then cut my big pieces first and my small ones after, thinking it wouldn't be the end of the world if I had to have some contrast pieces somewhere in there (although I didn't).  I did piece the waistband.

Oh, by the way, I used Butterick 3168 with some modifications.  I made the bodice and skirt one piece, rather than separated with a thin band of elastic in a casing at the waist, and instead added five rows of elastic thread shirring to cinch it in.

Here's what the dress looks like now!

There you go!  Hope you feel a little better cutting into thrifted pieces to make something new =).  It's really a satisfying feeling, when you get done!