Drop Waist Knit Dresses

Recently, I have been playing around refashioning t-shirts.  I trimmed down a few old adult tee's into some little girl nightgowns, but then I wanted to make some dresses.  I first tried a dress from scratch.  I constructed this completely from a maternity shirt that I have no intention of EVER wearing again in my life.  While it went pretty well, it ended up being about a size 4, and really did not fit Abigail.  I also didn't realize until after I washed this dress that I needed to be using a ball point needle.  Not to shabby for a first attempt.  It could have been cute on her, next year, but I scrapped it to make an even better creation.

My next efforts were based off of three t-shirts that Abigail already had that fit her.  I simply added a tube of material, cut from another t-shirt, to the bottom to make them little dresses.  Each dress is slightly different though they are all built on the same construction principle.  

This skirt is the least gathered.  It was constructed from a shirt of my eldest daughters that was too short for her to wear any longer.   I was able to stretch the t-shirt to its max girth to match the skirt addition.

 The Purple skirt was formerly a plain shirt of mine.  It was a very cheap t-shirt that had absolutely no shape, so its second life is a drastic improvement.  I needed to sew a gathering stitch around the tube before attaching to the top.  I'm thinking about adding a purple gathered ruffle around the bottom of the sleeves to make it more co-hesive.   

 This dress ended up having the most gathering of the bunch.  The skirt was the above mentioned maternity shirt that masqueraded as a toddler dress for a single day.  The skirt was twice the width of the t-shirt making the skirt much fuller than the others.  

I love these simple dresses for so many reasons.  

1. I don't need to find a coordinating bottom when dressing her in the morning.
2. I don't need to find a coordinating bottom when dressing her again a few hours later.
3. Only one piece of laundry to wash.
4. Only one piece of laundry to fold.
5. Only one piece of laundry to put away!

With 15 minutes of time, a $4.00 t-shirt from Target, an old t-shirt and one seam to sew, anyone can fill their little ones closet with cute every day play dresses!

Maternity Dress Refashion

While blog hopping, you will find a few zillion tutorials on how to up-cycle different articles of clothing. I have a few articles of clothing set out for such purposes, but this dress was higher in priority. This is a maternity dress by Motherhood Maternity, which I bought used for $5.00, that fit well when I had a baby bump, but now that I have a basketball bump, the dress is just a bit too short to comfortably wear to church.

I have 6 pairs of yoga style black maternity pants, and some of them are floods, so they were an easy choice to donate to the project. I cut off the pant leg hem and also the waist band, then I pressed the pants so that the outer leg seam was 1/4 of an inch to one side. I then cut 4 inches from that outer seam the entire length of the leg so that my material was really 8 inches wide, with a seam 4 and 1/4 inch from the front side. Repeat this from the other leg of the pants, so there were 2 long strips. The bottom of the dress was 35" wide so I trimmed the length of the strips to 35 1/2 inch and sewed them together to make one long tube using a 1/4 inch seam.

From that point, all I needed to do was to fold the strip back in half, making sure that the seam was going to be on the inside of the dress, and pin it to the dress hem. Because I was working with 2 very stretchy materials, I pinned very close together to increase my chances at an even finished look without puckering. I do not have a walking foot, so I stitched very slowly, making sure to not pull on the materials while sewing with a small zig zag stitch. Viola! I can now wear this dress for the next 12 weeks of pregnancy.

If I get adventurous, another day, I might shorten the sleeves and add a black binding to those too.... I haven't decided yet. What do you think?

Onesie Refashion

Abi has decided it is time to start learning to go to potty, which renders her onsies pretty useless. She has quite a few long sleeve onsies from winter time that still fit her so I have decided to make them work for a little while longer.

Using my sewing scissors, I trimmed right above the leg binding all around the bottom of the onesie first, and then slightly eased the curve to be a bit less dramatic. I then just set my sewing machine to a wide zig-zag and pulled the cut edge taught while stitching to create a lettuce effect. Since it does not require turning under a hem the shirt is still plenty long enough for her. If summer ever arrives I think I will further refashion her onesies to be short sleeves. This refashion took about 5 minutes with Abi helping on each step. She knew they were her shirts and wanted to take part after all!