Easy DIY Tips for Re-Designing a Basic Strapless Dress

There are a lot of benefits to buying basic clothes – they tend to be cheaper, more comfortable, and perfect for your every-day style. However, a lot of the more simple outfits are very standard and let’s face it – a bit boring. The good news is that you can easily re-design them, creating a more trendy and unique look in less than  hour. These easy DIY tips can help you re-designing a strapless dress and create 3 different outfits.

I started off wearing this plain white strapless dress. The model is very simple, but the quality is great and I love the fact that the dress is lined.

I wanted to experiment a bit and create a more interesting outfit, so I used elastic black lace to make a side strap and sew it on the dress. Using elastic lace makes it a lot easier to make straps, because you will not have to worry too much about the length. Even if you are a newbie at sewing like me, the elastic lace will help cover up any mistake you might make in terms of length.

Because the dress is lines, I was able to stitch the strap to the lining. As a result, there was no trace of stitches on the visible side of the dress. You can also sew some appliques, buttons, beads, or sequins to the lace strap to make it more interesting. I used white lace butterflies and stitched them to the lace using a white thread so the stitches are not visible. For more detailed instructions on how you can stitch a lace strap to a dress, you can check out this DIY video.

In another couple of weeks, I removed the side strap and replaced it with a strap behind the neck. This gave me a new and different look after less than 30 minutes of work. I also decided to customize the skirt of the dress by stitching black lace butterfly appliques.

Although I stitched the black butterfly appliques to the dress, the stitches left no trace once I removed them because the fabric of the dress is thick. Using all the materials above, I changed the look of the dress once again, this time adding several lace straps and more butterfly appliques.

For my final look, I sewed two straps – one on each side of the dress. Next, I added two more straps, creating criss-cross straps. I stitched white butterfly appliques to the black lace straps and black butterflies above the waist line of the dress.

In the end, I went through 4 different outfits that were all created using one basic dress. With these easy DIY projects, I had a new outfit every month or so without spending a lot of money and by only investing 30 minutes for each variation. Check out the links below for materials you can use to try out this DIY adventure:

For a step-by-step tutorial on creating these variations, you can check out this instruction video.