DIY No-Sew Tutu flower girl dresses

DIY No-Sew Tutu flower girl dresses

My cousin got married last Friday to her boyfriend of 6 years and she asked my daughter to be one of her 4 flower girls {yes, I know... FOUR flower girls! What can I say, we have a big family and we are lucky to have four little 3-4 year old princesses}

While brainstorming ideas for dresses for the 4 of them, my cousin mentioned she thought tutus would be cute. I agreed, and started scouring the internet to find something wedding-worthy we could buy.

Unfortunately, we found that tutu flower girl dresses are EXPENSIVE, so we started looking at buying some regular flower girl dresses off the racks instead. When we weren t finding something the bride loved, I decided to try my hand at making the tutu dresses she really wanted. I wish I could say that I relied on a step-by-step tutorial {that I could now point you to}, but I really was blindly going into the whole dress making business and, quite frankly, had no idea what I was doing.

To start with, I made some rookie mistakes - like buying the tulle by bolt instead of going for the pre-cut strips. GO WITH THE STRIPS - whatever extra they cost is 100% worth it. My other mistake is not accounting for how the elastic headband system we used stretches as you tie on the tulle, and then becomes too big. Thankfully, I did each dress one by one, so it was only the first dress that I needed to alter.

But, my biggest mistake was not accounting for comfort in the original design. Going into the project, I thought we would just need capri pants under the dress, but after I made the first prototype, I realized the top needed to be lined as well or the dress would be scratchy and uncomfortable. Because navy blue spaghetti strap tank tops are impossible to find, I had to buy white ones and then dye them with Rit dye in a plastic tub, which ended up setting me back a few days with washing and drying.

The dresses literally were finished two days before the wedding. This was fine because at that point they had been thoroughly tested and perfected, but I would have liked to have a larger window of completion before the wedding. If I ever do this again, I will definitely plan on getting them constructed sooner and then just fine tuning the last week, not doing major overhauls to the design. http://www.dressale.com/tutu-flower-girl-dresses_10v130.html