Stripy Love!

DH gave a couple of t-shirts for the refashion pile sometime last year. I wanted to use them to knock off this dress...I try on clothes these days and the first thought that pops in my head "nah, I bet I can make one just like it"



The old pic in the mirror trick :-)


 


 















Fast forward a few months and I bought some knit to make this Cynthia Rowley pattern. I wanted to make a muslin first since I don't have a serger and me being me, the knit I bought has an overall stripe to it. I still am not sure how I'm going to match up the sleeves.

The only way I could "make it work" was to cut up both t-shirts and come up with something. I made up the striped fabric, doing the exact thing for front and back, till I had a reasonable length. I shortened the pattern by an inch; overall, the dress ended up being about 3 inches shorter.

A before pic is almost mandatory, isn't it:-)
 



front and back pattern pieces on the fold, side by side




matched up stripes for front & back using the lengthen/shorten line on the pattern as a guide

 After cutting out the pieces, I thought it might be nice to have a topstitching detail on the stripe seams. A small debate about whether to change the thread for the brown stripe.. laziness won, inevitably. I decided it might be a design detail to show the white thread. I faked a cover stitch on the hem too.. just two rows parallel to each other.















Sleeves:
I struggled with figuring out how to piece the sleeves together so the stripes would match. I didn't quite get it right but I'm thrilled with the result! I used one sleeve from each t-shirt to get to elbow length (view B on the pattern). The brown t-shirt had a grey band already, I took it as sign and just let it be.

 

The bow-y dress

This is viewB of see & sew 5801 without the ruffle at the shoulder. It was fairly straight forward. I decided to reverse the direction of the bows on the bodice and skirt, mostly because I was feeling lazy and didn't want to match all the bow-y stripes.

Fabric used: a cotton knit.
I cut a size 4, it fits my daughter well.

Sweatshirt refashion!

I had bought a few sweatshirts for my daughter last year when they were on sale ..problem now is, she wants to wear only dresses with leggings. A quick search in the land of pink and purple aka her closet yielded a pair of purple sweatpants she has outgrown.

and they are an exact match for the purple on the flower!

 The pants and they were big enough to cut up and add a skirt to the sweatshirt.

Gathered the top of the skirt so the width aligns with the width of the shirt
 

I didn't want to lose the original hem of the sweatshirt and if I attached the skirt in the normal way, it would be very bulky. I decided to have an overlap instead. I ended up topstitching the skirt, after a few frustrated dates with the seam ripper trying to pin it and do it on the wrong side. It just didn't look clean.


a cute dress