Look what I made! A shirt to dress conversion.

Well, I've had an interesting day, LOL. I've finally had the energy to tackle the women's shirt to child's dress conversion I mentioned the other day, and, I have to say, I'm pretty happy with the outcome!

As you might remember, I started with this pretty size 18 (XL) women's button-up shirt:

I used this tutorial, which is based around using a men's shirt, which has a yoke at the back. The shirt I found was a women's shirt though, and had no yoke at the back, darts down the front and back and under the bust, and was made from a stretch fabric! Nevertheless, for $5 I didn't have much to lose if it didn't turn out :-)

I started by unpicking all the seams with a seam ripper (you've gotta love those things), including all the darts, which took me about 2 hours! But I did it in front of the tennis (on TV) last night, so it wasn't too bad. I ended up with these bits and pieces:

The I ironed the front and back of the shirt to even out where the darts had been, and then folded them in half. I measured around Miss 6's chest and got 58.5cm (23 inches) - according to the tutorial, she added 3" for ease and then divided it by four, and added seam allowance, so that's what I did and ended up with 18cm. Then I measured from under her arm to her waist and got 15cm, plus seam allowance. Which gave me a rectangle for the bodice which I marked on the wrong side of the back piece of the shirt with a pencil and ruler, and then I just drew a straight line from the bodice to the bottom corner of the shirt (you might need to click on the pic to see the pencil lines):

I cut it out, and pinned it to the front of the shirt, which I had also folded in half, and got these:

When I sewed the side seams together, I ended up with this (below), which I tried on Miss 6 and it was way too big! I ended up taking in the side seams another 3cm along the bodice, so maybe I shouldn't have allowed for so much ease when using a stretch fabric? Anyway, I just left the extra side seams inside the dress as I figured it might be useful for letting out when she inevitably grows over winter so we can get next summer out of it as well.

Note that because it was a women's shirt, the bottom hem has that nice rounded finish. Unlike the tutorial, which cut the shirt straight across, I decided to incorporate the bottom hem because a) it looked nice, b) it was one less (big) hem I had to sew and c) Miss 6 seems to grow about an inch a day so she needs all the length she can get.

Then I folded over the top edge of the bodice twice and hemmed it, by just machine sewing around it. I then decided that the bodice was pretty boring and definitely needed some definition - plus my hem sewing is *really* wonky LOL - so I grabbed some narrow pink ric rac I bought for $1 at the stupidmarket the other day, and sewed it around the top edge and again around the waist. Don't look closely 'cause it's *really* shoddy! I didn't even pin it first, 'cause I am the impatient type ;-)

Anyhoo, then I looked at the tutorial to see how the sleeves were done, and decided that the sleeves from my shirt were way too deep (you can see them in the second pic, above) to get the same effect as those in the tutorial - they'd end up looking like bat wings, LOL. So I ended up just cutting a couple of narrow strips from one of the sleeves, folded them in half and sewed around two edges, then turned them inside out using a knitting needle. I measured them on Miss 6 and machine sewed them onto the inside of the bodice seam - I didn't bother shortening them either as I now have a couple of inches extra to let them out as Miss 6 gets taller.

And this is the final result! The back:

Here you can see the dodgy ric rac sewing on the back, and how the buttons go down the back:

And the front! Ta da! (Just ignore the threads still hanging down from the hem LOL.)


Miss 6 is pretty stoked with it, and frankly, I am too! Not bad for around 4 hours work sewing, and I have NO prior experience other than a few high school sewing classes over 20 years ago. I'm sure if I knew what I was doing I could whip one up in a couple of hours? I will most definitely be having another go at this, I think I now have the Refashionista bug, thanks to Eilleen :-D