Harry Potter – Flying Keys Dress | Butterick B5603

Things used :

Disclaimer

This dress was made in 2018. Below you’ll find the original blog post I wrote about it from my old defunct website. Enjoy! ~

Occasionally, I like to hit up the secondhand stores when I visit my Family in Whangarei. Sometimes, I find awesome vintage (does 2000s Harry Potter count as Vintage now?) blankets which just scream at me to be up-cycled. I came across this Harry Potter one for $3 and had to have it.

Upon buying it, I was unsure whether to turn it in to a dress or skirt. I was leaning more toward a skirt as the print of Harry, Ron and Hermione catching the keys was quite large and I didn’t think it would translate well to a dress. I put a poll up on my Instagram asking my followers which they’d prefer to help me decide. It was really close right until the end, but the final tally was 60% for the dress and 40% for a skirt.

Now that I knew I’d be making a dress, it was a matter of deciding what kind of style. I’ve been hording vintage sewing patterns so I just had to pick a style I thought would work well.
I chose to go with B5603 because I’d made one of the dresses before and liked the fit, and also because it required one of the least amount of fabric to make the dress (only 3.40m). This time I chose to make a different style though, just for something different, so I went with dress C.

First things first, was to unpick the blanket so it would lay flat as one sheet of fabric.
Usually I tend to cut overlocking off because it’s easier and saves time, however, in the interest of saving as much fabric as possible, I painstakingly unpicked it all.

Another odd thing I did, was save the tag. I had previously brought a Felix the Cat dress from a car show a few years ago, that had also been made from a blanket, and a cute little touch the lady had added to it, was sewing the original duvet tag in to the seam of the new dress.

Now I had to figure out how I was going to have the print layed out on my dress. The print of the golden trio catching keys was kinda higgilty-piggilty on the blanket and I knew I wanted it more cohesive on my dress.

I put the pattern pieces over the print, so the gang would sit along the bottom of the skirt of the dress and act like a border. For the bodice, I put the pieces over any bits of the blue sky I could find, with the exception of the left breast piece, which I thought would look cool with the Harry Potter logo on it.
The lining, was cut from whatever bits of the fabric were left.

The dress itself was quite simple to make, it was an easy pattern to follow. However me being me, still managed to stuff it up stupendously. I attached on of the front bodice panels to the back and the back to the front. I only noticed this after I had perfectly ironed, top stitched and sewn the whole bodice together and then was left wondering why the fit was so off. So unpicker to the rescue.

Aside from that, the whole construction went smoothly. I took great care to iron pieces as I went, and even top stitched the bodice so it would sit nice.

I’m very happy with the results, especially considering I really did not think it would work well as a dress.

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Difficulty : *
Time : 4-5 hours (if you’re going to make mistakes like me)
Cost : 1/2$