Recycled Shirt Dress

If you like to sew, then you need to get acquainted with the blog Made.  The lovely Dana is a sewing dynamo and posts lots of easy projects and tutorials–easy but still challenging for a novice sewer like myself.  I’ve been wanting to make this little shirt dress for a while now and I finally got around to it.  

{This is a variation of the dress I did, but this picture shows the before and after.} 

 Since sewing can actually be more expensive than buying clothes nowadays, I love recycling old clothes since it’s a way to create something new and actually save money.  Win/win.  The project finally presented itself when last weekend we were doing some spring cleaning.  I’ve been wanting the hubs to get rid of some shirts for a while, but he’s always been hesitant due to sentimental attachment.  One shirt in particular happens to be an old shirt of his dad’s and one that he wore on our first date–he just doesn’t want to let go.  Suddenly I remembered this tutorial and ta-da! problem solved.  I’m kinda mad at myself for not taking a before shot of the shirt, but I think you can probably picture what it looked like. 

Now the first-date-shirt is a cute summer frock for our first born–a rather fitting tribute I think.  It was an easy project and Beanie LOVES her new dress.  Thank you mommy, you’re so nice for making me a new dress!  I’ve already got another shirt in the queue and at the rate I’m going I have a feeling she could be wearing multiple versions of this dress all summer long.  The other nice thing about this dress is that it’s pretty fool-proof.  I didn’t do a great job on a lot of the edges/seams, but since they’re gathered anyway it’s really hard to mess up.  Yay!  Now go get your sew on. 

 {My model was a little less than willing today due to a double knee scrape injury… she’s doing better now}. 

See tutorial here.