Tshirt Dresses

That girl child of mine … she LOVES her dresses. She would probably wear dresses all the time if she could. Well dresses and jeans … she does love her jeans. Anyhow, while we were in NYC I wanted to get her a cute souvenir t’shirt, but I couldn’t find ANY that weren’t A) ugly B) cheesy C) ridiculously priced D) made from terribly coarse fabric. But somewhere rattling around upstairs was the notion that I’d seen on the internets somewhere that one can make an adult’s t’shirt into a dress. So on this leap of memory faith, I purchased a hot pink ladies I ♥ NY t’shirt for Miss Tabby. The exchange with the Indian (Syrian???) guy at the booth was hilarious. He saw me holding it up to her to see how it would fit and kept insisting he had ones that would fit her better (they had child-esque drawings of NYC on them and were the SCRATCHIEST fabric I’ve ever handled) and I could not communicate that I didn’t WANT them to fit her but finally he let the crazy lady have her way. $8/each and they’re soft, so good bargain IMHO.

So I looked up on the internets how to make the t’shirt into a dress and came across this great instructable tutorial on the matter. I followed it to the best of my rather suspect sewing abilities and produced a fairly decent dress for Tabby. Bolstered my some sewing success (this is rare for me) I decided to dig out an old t’shirt of mine from our “t’shirt quilt” (that I will never actually get around to making) box of discarded shirts and make her a second dress. This one had a much larger logo that would have been cut off by the previous method, so I made a modification. My interpretations for both follow.

You start with two shirts … a long sleeved T that already fits your kiddo well and the Tshirt of potential that you want to turn into a dress. Just lay the child tshirt on top of the adult tshirt and mark as shown above (purple dotted lines). Make sure you are not just marking the perimeter of the kid’s shirt – mark enough for seam allowance! The bottom of the shirt can be marked right at the edge since tshirts are a bit longer than you would want the bodice to be.

Then you cut the pieces as shown (purple markings again). You will come up with a top (bodice) and skirt and a couple pieces of scrap. If the skirt is too long, you can cut off the TOP right now to get it the correct length.

Next comes the sewing. You will turn your top/bodice inside out and sew the bottom seam of the sleeves right on down through the side seams of the top. This will basically make a long-sleeved T with an unfinished bottom hem. Then you set your machine to do a LONG stitch length and baste all the way around the skirt. Don’t backstitch! These stitches should be loose. Once you’re done with the basting, you need to pull on the threads of the basting stitch. This will gather the fabric up along the top. I would periodically redistribute the fabric somewhat evenly over the waist and then pull some more and redistribute. Your goal is to have a skirt with a waist the same size roughly as your bodice and all the gathers more or less evenly distributed over it.

The last bit is to attach the skirt to the top. Don’t laugh, but I seriously took FOREVER to figure out which way to set this up to get it right, so I thought I’d share. You want to sew it together so that the top is right side facing out and the skirt is all around it and looks like it has been flipped up in the wind (wrong side out). Then you sew the two pieces together, making sure you’re sewing to the LEFT of the basting stitches so they don’t show. It was a bit weird at first to sew gathered fabric instead of flat, but it worked well enough. I found it was pretty key to flatten everything outward so I didn’t accidentally get some of the bodice pulled over and puckered up. I sewed this pretty slowly.

Here’s the finished product. This was made from a woman’s XL stretchy Tee and gives T about 3/4 length sleeves.

For the second dress I made her, I used a Madison Farmer’s Market Tshirt way back from our days in Mad City. It had a great logo, but it was big and I didn’t want to cut it off. So here’s the method I used on that.

This one I didn’t cut a separate piece for a skirt, I just extended the cuts for the top diagonally down from the armpits to the bottom of the tshirt in an A-line.

Obviously construction is more simple as well on this one. You simply turn wrong-sides out and sew up the side and sleeve seams and then turn right-sides out. I ended up having to hem this because it was way long on Tabby. That is a disadvantage with this one – you can’t take excess fabric out of the middle as you can with the other.

Here is the finished product on the A-line skirt. I like this a lot, especially the logo. But next time I think I’d like to make the angle of the A-line more pronounced. It looks, especially in this photo, a bit like a really long long-sleeved T as opposed to a dress. But I think it is a nice option for Tshirts with bigger logos.

I am a big fan of this project since it’s practical and cheap! I unearthed a too-big-for-me-now (yay!) purple polo that I am going to tackle tonight. Hopefully it will be a success.