 Hi you guys! Welcome back to the next episode in my January series. This video is going to be all about how you can make this free people dress all on your own. Isn't it so cute? As soon as I saw it I was like A. that's cute and B. I can do that. So I was like flipping through the pictures reading the reviews taking like getting close-up shots and all the things to suss out if it was going to be feasible and I think it turned out really great. So before I reveal it to you fully let me show you how I got to where I am. So first of all you're going to take any pair of jeans right? You are going to cut off the leg and I tried to preserve these as if I were going to make shorts just so that I'm not being wasteful of all of this. So I left about a 3-4 inch inseam. You do you on that part. Then once you have your leg you know which looks something like this you want to cut open. It really doesn't matter either the inseam or the outseam. I ended up doing the outseam but you could do this one as well. And then once you have that fully cut open you are going to pretend that this has the original jean hem on it. It would look something like this. Okay obviously this is not the same pair of jeans but you have this attached to this right? Take about I think I did six inch pieces so I cut six inches off the bottom of every single jeans leg. So for every pair of jeans you're getting two panels and I think I went through maybe five or six when I went to the thrift store or shop to your own jeans whatever you're doing. I was really just looking at it for a variety of dyes like I wanted dark denim, medium color denim, light color denim you know that kind of thing. And I was also making sure that all of the hems like looked similar. I didn't want one with black thread for example. I was trying to get all of them to have this gold. And the part that I love the most about the free people dress is that all of the hems look really worn. That's why I didn't want to just take denim and hem it myself and then put it together. I wanted to look like these have been dragging on the ground for however long they've been dragging. Okay so once you get to that place then it's time to like lay out your pieces and it might look complicated but it's really not. You're just going to lay one right side up facing this way and then you take another one and you make sure the hem is facing inward and you place them like this right and then once you sew that down then you take another one and you place it like this and you just start alternating all the way down placing each new jean leg at the bottom of the one below it so there's really not that much space underneath. And then in between each one feel free to come in and clip and cut and all of that. I didn't do that. I just left it all and it's fine. It's a little bit heavier but not the end of the world. Anyway so your next piece would go here and then here and then here and then here. Okay so the the thing with this is you need to make sure you are planning out your pieces a little bit because for example this one is not going to cover the entire width of my body so I would have wanted to put this one on top and then this one would have gone wait hold on overlapping this way yes and then this one would have gone here and then that might have covered my body so you just want to pay attention to the width of your strips so when you're shopping another thing that's important I forgot to mention is getting denim that's really wide leg flares those kinds of things. That way you have legs that are really really wide so that you have opportunities for them to be really really long and cover you know the entire like diagonal width of your body. I was able to use my dress form to accomplish this which made it really really simple. I have a ditto form if you're not familiar it's like an exact copy of my body. I'll leave a link in the description box if you're interested in learning more about that but it did make it super super easy for me to just lay out all the pieces and see where I was missing and when I was looking at the free people version the back is solid which makes sense because a it would be heavy b you wouldn't want to sit on all those seams so I was like that fully makes sense so I just grabbed heavier weight denim because this is heavy the top the front is heavy and I didn't want it to be pulling to the front so I was trying to balance the weight a little bit. I did that I grabbed some heavy weight denim and then I grabbed any pattern that I had that had a solid back this one happened to have the shy darts which I think is really flattering on my body. It gives a different shape than the inspiration the inspiration is more of a tent dress. This one obviously has like you know it's closer fitting to the body but I kind of liked that a little bit because there is just so much fabric. Anyway so I found this one this simplicity pattern 9223 and it just has like the plain shoulder sleeveless option and you know just no no waist seams nothing going on just a straight sheath dress and I use that cut out the back piece only sew the back to the top or to the front and this is what I have tada here she is in all her glory. All right so you can see the little bottom corners you barely need any width of him at all but as you get into the middle sections these are very very long so that's why you want to get wide leg jeans as best you can. As you come up to the top again the pieces get a little bit shorter. I did cut my own arm side then I sewed the back of that simplicity pattern so I have a center vaccine and these are the fish eye darts that were in there and then yeah it's just the rest of the dress. The simplicity pattern does have a zipper I didn't put a zipper in I just wanted to see can I get into this without a zipper I was thinking that would be easier and it is so I left the zipper out there's a lot of stretch in this just because all of these are like on the bias so I was able to kind of just pull it on not the easiest thing but not the hardest thing. Then I tried it on adjusted the shoulders and you can see I still have some raw hems oh I also made the back neckline more of a v on this one it is rounded but it just felt very like constricting. This is very high up on my neck if I could do it again I don't know part of me really likes it it's so high up on my neck part of me is like I don't know that's not really the inspiration part of me is like turn these down I don't know you guys are gonna have to to tell me I kind of think it's cool and unique and different and I don't I'm not trying to copy the free people one exactly exactly I mean maybe I don't know it didn't work out that way for me and that's okay that this is a little bit different but anyways you can see I have raw hems here I have raw arm size and I have a raw hem on the bottom so the plan for those are to apply bias tape and just turn them all under you know and fold them under and top stitch them I could probably get away with just turning them under you know and not doing bias tape but I don't know bias tape seems easier to me same thing for this back neckline so I can I left a little bit of space right here see how there's extra so that I can attach or turn under whatever I end up doing to make those match in the end okay and then same thing for the hem on the bottom you can just turn it up a couple times and then have your hem so hopefully this will get you going I will have a full reveal of this obviously once I get it all done get those little kinks worked out but I wanted to just give you guys the motivation and the inspiration to get started on yours let me know what you guys think of it if you have any ideas for me for the neckline or anything else that jumped out at you as I was walking through this obviously have any questions leave those everything in the comment section below and I will be back very soon with another tutorial using denim