Mad Sewing Skills -T-shirt Dress Style

What happens when you hang out with the World’s Best Seamstress (A.K.A My Mom)?

See she even dresses the part with the measuring tape necklace and scissors. Thankfully no one has been maimed or hurt yet when she walks with them. Anyway if you hang out with her long enough then your creative skills tend to bubble up from their long buried depths. Or at least I find myself thinking on a much thriftier, self-reliant train of thought while I’m around her.

My brain thinking wheels thankfully started turning because of Hope (yes, her again). I should find interesting stuff about my other kids to blog about or rename this blog ‘Living with Hope’. Anyway, Hope loves wearing dresses. Makes her feel like a Princess. Thing is, cheap, durable dresses are hard to come buy and she is constantly stripping down and handing me her nice but extremely delicate Sunday dresses and begging me to help her put on her princess dress. So my big sewing project I decided to tackle while killing time at Grandmas home this week was T-shirt dresses for my girls.

So I paid about $24 bucks for 6 shirts. Three Kid decorative and Three Adult Plain.
For the Two Year Old I bought a size 4-5 Decorative Tee, and an Adult Medium Pain Tee
For the Six Year Old I bought a size 7-8 Decorative Tee, and an Adult Medium Plain Tee
For the Nine Year Old I got a size 14-16 Decorative Tee, and an Adult Large Plain Tee – However next time I think I’d get the Plain Tee in a XL or XXL size.

I hacked up the shirts like so….

Taking about 4 inches off the bottom of the decorative Tee’s and cutting the adult pain tee’s just below the sleeve line. However I made the 9 Year old longer and I tapered it a bit so I could use almost all the material from the neck down. I left the bottom shirt seam on the plain tees alone so I wouldn’t have to re-do the hems.

Next step – Gather the top cut part of the plain tee’s (future skirt). My mom showed me this trick and I’ve always used it to gather material. Sew a zigzag stitch over a larger thread and to gather just pull on the larger thread while bunching the fabric.

Then you pair the gathered skirt with the decorative tee – Right sides together and pin them in place.

If you have a Serger

(Lucky) this would be great but you can sew these two sides together with a regular sewing machine as well.

Flip them right side out and top stitch around the waist on the none gathered side of the decorative Tee.

TaDa! In my first attempt I've just made three dresses. But wait that's not all.

Hope now has a new Princess Dress.

Princess doesn't think this is a bad idea. She likes it too!

And Lea loves the opportunity to model.

Now if you’re related to the world best seamstress then you can take the Tee-shirt scrapes and make the 2 year old a bonus dress. Don’t ask me how? It’s a little too complicated for me to explain in this blog. Maybe future one? I somehow managed it and I think it’s my favorite of the three dresses.

But I like them all. Now Hope has some play dresses that will last and she might give her Sunday dresses a break.

$24 worth of Six tee-shirts = Four dresses at $6 buck-a-roo’s a piece. And it took about 2 ½-3 hours to complete the entire project. I think I’ll have to make some more when I get home. Definately worth my time.