Shirt-turned-Dress Refashion

I can't decide if I like creating brand new things, or refashioning old things into new, useful ones. As of this moment, I think I'm leaning toward to the latter. After some successful garage sale-ing last week, I was a tad disappointed when one of my bargain striped-shirts was impossibly tiny. It looked like it would fit when I bought it, but maybe I was just feeling uber skinnny that day. In reality, the happy, striped jersey-knit shirt was a no-go...but I was determined to find a purpose for it.

After looking at how much fabric I had to work with, I decided to refashion the shirt into a dress for my darling girl. What kid wouldn't like a soft dress to romp around in?!

Okay, so here is the shirt as I purchased it. Pretty, huh? *sigh*


I cut the sleeves off of the shirt so it would be easier to work with. Then, grabbing some brown butcher paper and a dress Olivia currently fits into, I laid it out and made a rough pattern. I've seen other people doing stuff like this on their blog tutorials, so I figured I'd give it a try. It was way too easy! Why haven't I done this before?!



I laid the pattern over the body of the shirt, figured out where I wanted the neckline and hem to fall and started cutting. I was considering making it a sleeveless dress, but thought some capped sleeves would be awfully cute. I had plenty of material in the sleeves, so cut them down for the dress. Sleeves have always given me a bit of a hard time, but thankfully, the striped lines up, and pinning the tar out of them before sewing was most helpful. Once the sleeves were on, I lined up the stripes on the sides of the dress and stitched away. **Oh the things I could do with a serger!** Ahem.



Once the sides were stitched, I simply had to turn the dress inside out and was done. Well...I still need to hand-tack the inside of the back collar so it won't roll out, but aside from that, my shirt-turned kiddo's dress only took me about an hour! I am very happy with how it ended up. So happy in fact that I'm camped outside Olivia's room, waiting to try it on her when she gets up from her nap.



What do ya think?! :)