Prom Dress Make-Over!

If you're the Mom of a daughter who is going to Prom this year, you may have noticed that there are practically ~NO~ dresses out there that are modest. They are either strapless or have spaghetti straps.

Finding a modest dress is pretty much impossible unless you order it from an online store or search for one on Ebay. Most of the online stores that Jillian and I had found were over-priced, so that left Ebay. Still not much to choose from that she liked.

Having limited funds, we decided to shop for a dress that was immodest and then give it a make-over.

In the past, she has gone to 2 formal Christmas dances. We found a dress both times that needed altering. Luckily she chose dresses that were either black or had black on it. So we were able to just buy a black shrug to cover her up. I sewed it onto her dresses. Both still looked adorable. See?
Anyway, for Prom, she wanted something other than black. We found an adorable bright pink dress at JC Penney that was, get this.....over HALF off! We only paid $39.99 vs. over a hundred dollars for a dress from other stores in the mall.

So this dress had a spaghetti strap that went around her neck. Not modest at all.
Because it was so pretty, sparkley and *cheap*, we decided to snag it and deal with the immodesty somehow.

We didn't know what we could do with a bright pink dress. No shrug was going to match perfectly. Cripes, I couldn't even find a pink shrug anyway. We also didn't think that a black or white shrug would look as nice as something that was the same color of the dress. So I searched online for alternate ideas. Boy, I love the Internet. How did we ever live without it many moons ago?!!

I found a website, ModestProm.com. They had several ideas to alter a Prom dress. The pattern I chose to use is here.

So easy! Or so I thought. No, actually, it was easy, but I'm not much of a seamstress, so I lacked confidence thinking I might not be able to pull it off.

With help from my Mother-in-law, who sewed the edges all the way around the 2 pieces (thank you again for that Mom!), and a few tears of my own because I thought I might not get it done in time, I was able to accomplish the task.

Here are some before and after photos. Please excuse the immodest looking one that is just for demonstration purposes.



Presto change-o.
Though the sleeves weren't perfect, I believe it actually made the dress look better. Plus, I'm really proud of Jillian for making the choice to be modest in the first place. She gave me no arguments (even 2 years ago she didn't) and ended up looking beautiful. Of course I had to make a digital layout based on her "choose the right" choice. :)

I suppose I better give a shout out to our friend Sharon (who just had a beautiful baby girl last Thursday!) for doing Jillian's hair. She did an excellent job and must have been tired that night because she did 2 different girls hair for Proms in one day. All while standing for hours when she was 9 months pregnant! Sharon rocks! Here's a photo of the back of Jillian's hair.

Cute huh?

Now if dress makers could only raise that bust-line a bit! -sigh-