Eyelets and Ribbons

I have this dress that has been sitting in my fabric pile because I couldn’t add a zipper to it unless I made it smaller and if I made it smaller, it would no longer fit me. I was sad because I loved this dress. But laying in bed (where I come up with most of my great ideas) I figured I could add eyelets and a ribbon and then I wouldn’t have to make the dress smaller. So thankfully for me, my sister already had the tool, all I needed was eyelets and it ended up being 50 eyelets, which I concluded later really only needed to be 30, but now its done and I love how it turned out.

I made marks with a pen before I started, I would recommend not using an ink pen, but something less permanent, so you can change where you put the eyelets as you go.

This is time consuming but really rather easy with the tool. All I did was punch a hole through the fabric with the tool and then stick the eyelet pieces on the top and bottom and crimp down with the tool and it was done. I know that you can do this also with the little tool that comes with the eyelets, you don’t have to buy the expensive tool. And to punch the holes a paper hole punch should work.

After your eyelets are in you can start threading your ribbon. This was hard. I used 10 yards of ribbon to start. I have to cut some off, but wanted to make sure I had the length I needed before I cut and with so many eyelets I wasn’t sure. Also you need to be able to open up the dress to get it off, in which you need a lot of extra ribbon.

This dress is not completely finished, the hem and back need to be sewed. I love the green against the pink dress.

I love this dress on but its very time consuming, this will definitely only be for special occasions and ones in which I wont need to get out of it quickly. It took my daughter about 5 minutes time to get the ribbons laced up and about the same for me to get them undone, that may not seem long, but if you think about how fast you can unzip something, well 5 minutes becomes really long