Friday, January 14, 2011

Ruffled T-Shirt Dress

We are moving so my daughter has started at a new school. Since she is coming in in the middle of the school year, all they had left of their school T-shirts were larges and extra larges. Caralie is a small, at best. Luckily I had seen a tutorial on Make It and Love It for converting a t-shirt into a ruffled dress. I loosely followed the tutorial since I had to do some major overhauling of this thing:

She could've worn it as a nightgown it was so big. I ended up cutting out the sleeves, taking it in significantly, and refashioning the sleeves just to make the t-shirt portion fit right. The shirt was still super long, so I cut off about 7-8 inches off the bottom to use as the lining for the ruffles. I bought 1/2 yard of heather gray jersey at Joann and cut it into 5 1/2 x 60 inch strips. I hemmed the strips, sewed them into a round, then gathered them and stitched them to the lining. I think it turned out pretty cute:

Caralie had gone to bed before I'd even fixed the sleeves, so she was completely surprised when she woke up in the morning to find her new t-shirt dress:

She was very happy with the results and told me that I am the best mommy in the world. That almost made it worth sewing with knits. I am not converted to knits like everyone else in blogland. At least they are forgiving and hide a multitude of flaws.

Now I just need to make a matching hair accessory with the scraps.

Maybe.