DIY Sock dress for blythe!

March 18th, 2010
by awhimofmine

Hello hello, lovely Blythers!

As a poor student I am all too aware that not everyone has the funds to dress their girls up and down as much as they want to, so I am here to share with you my tutorial for this sweet little sweater dress made from half a sock. That’s right! You can get FOUR dresses from a pair of socks! Keep em’ all, give some away to your friends, you even have my permission to sell them (YOU ARE WELCOME) because socks come in so many awesome patterns which will be all over the place, so we could all find some great ones we haven’t seen before in etsy stores!

The AWESOME thing about this dress is that there is no pattern and it is really slap dash, it doesn’t matter how messy or lazy or “beginner” your stitching and cutting is, it turns out great anyway! You’ll be able to see this in my photos, as I threw this particular dress together in about 15 minutes
These socks are a little plain, but they are the ones I had laying around that I had never worn and wanted to experiment with! So without further ado, on with the tute!

YOU WILL NEED:

1 cute sock
needle and thread OR sewing machine with a ballpoint needle for stretch.
Sharp scissors
Measuring tape or blythe doll
Pins (optional)
2 Matching buttons / hot glue (Optional)
2 Closures of your choice

1: Choose your sock. It needs to have at least 13cm of ‘leg,’ by which I mean area above the heel, to get two out of the sock. You will see what I mean later on. This one has much more than I needed. Tube socks obviously would work well.

2: Measure 13-15cm from the top of your sock (the elastic cuff, being the bottom of the dress) and cut. Or, just measure it on your blythe so that the top of sock/bottom of dress sits just below the knee, and then make your cut at shoulder height, like I did:

3: Cut!

4: Cut in half vertically.

5: Take one half. Cut a neckline approximately 2.5cm deep. I just do this freehand, but I’ve pinned it here so you can see what I mean. In case you can’t quite see it here, the open part of the curve is the fold, the other side is the cut side. The other half can be another dress! If you had an ankle sock or shorter sock, this is where you can get the one half and then just throw away the half with the heel on it. Or keep it and think of something great to do with it!

6: Unfold, and there is your neckline!

7: Pin the side seams from the top, about 2/3 of the way down.

8. Stitch them! They WILL stretch out a bit when using a sewing machine, because we can’t choose which way the grain goes when using a sock. Don’t worry. This is a good thing. If you are stitching by hand, you might even want to stretch the fabric out a little as you go to get a similar effect.

9. Pin and stitch the neckline.

10: Pin and stitch the side seams… notice how shoddy mine are? Doesn’t matter one bit!

11: Turn inside out. The side seam you just sewed is now the centre back, and the front should look something like a stretched out Donnie Darko-esque bunny.

12: Pin and stitch down the ends of the straps/bunny ears, it is basically impossible to do this on a sewing machine, much easier to just do it by hand. Note: this is optional, it’s just for tidiness.

13: Attach your closures, I like to put the sharp bits of velcro on the part facing away from the doll to avoid scratches and pulls in tights, etc.

14: Scootch it up her legs this way… (probably an unnecessary photo, but you get it anyway) and then criss-cross the straps over her shoulders (ooh!)

15: If you are like me, you can glue buttons over where you stitched on the velcro because it looked so bad. If you’re not like me, it looks kinda cute anyway but you don’t have to do it!

Look, you did it! Wasn’t it easy? With practice it will get REALLY easy, just make sure you don’t get sloppy, like me! Find the cutest socks you can, kids socks would be fantastic but you’d probably get one dress per sock depending on the size. Still pretty good right? If you guys make one (Or many!) please post them in the sewing forum so everyone can see!

As I have never actually written a tutorial before, so I hope it makes sense. Feel free to comment or even pm me with any questions!

Have fun
-Amy