How to Shorten the Back Waist of a Dress with a zipper - Boho wedding dress part 1

Hello everyone! It's been a whole month since I had a post, but this new year started out rough getting sick with sinusitis and bronchitis! It was enough to set me back some, but now I'm finally playing catch up with some posts.

I decided to do a 4-part series on this lovely boho wedding gown. In this post, I'll show you how I shortened the back bodice at the waist. My next posts will cover shortening lace detailed sleeves, creating a scarf style modesty panel and a DIY bridal cummerbund belt.

This gown fit perfectly in the front but not in the back. The bodice at the waist needed to be shortened only in the back. The back appeared to be bubbling out and sagging. This is a very doable fix and I'll show you how I completed it.

This diagram shows exactly what was happening. The front fit perfectly fine but the back bodice was sagging and bubbling out. The solution I found was to take up the excess fabric in the back at the waist.

My next diagram here shows the alteration I decided to do. See the dotted line at the waist? That is where I'm going to remove the excess fabric to eliminate the sagging and bubbling. There is a back zipper I had to partially detach. My goal was to detach the zipper, make the alteration, then reattach the zipper.

Here is where I had it pinned up during the fitting. You can see it resembles the diagram above. I'm going to take up the excess and taper into the side seams. When I had this pinned on her, it looked better and worked for her body shape.