t-shirt dresses

This is the post you have all been waiting for!  I get Family Fun magazine.  If you don't, you should.  You can find deals all the time for cheap, I mean really cheap subscriptions.  I don't remember which one it was in, but they had this idea.  And I thought it was perfect.  My daughter loves dresses.  I don't get it.  But she loves them.  Once in a while Target runs sales on men t-shirts.  I got these shirts for less than $5.  Sale plus Carthwheel coupon (if you shop at Target, use Cartwheel.  Thank me later.)

The week of Dr. Seuss's birthday the school had all these fun themes each day.  On Friday it was dress as your favorite book character. Thinking I knew my daughter I figured she'd go for Pinkalicious and it would be easy to dress her in pink head to toe and we'd be done.  She threw me a curve ball.  Maybe even a spit ball.  She said Belle.  Yes, like Beauty & the Beast, Belle.  Well, Friday is also PE day.  Can't really send her in a frilly yellow dress, which is what she wanted.  So we compromised and went for book reading Belle, which is more my daughter anyway.

So Family Fun's instructions will be better than mine, but here it goes.

Get your t-shirt and turn it inside out.  

You'll need a dress that fits now to get the arm and neck openings right.

This is one from this week.

I used my disappearing ink/mark-b-gone pen and traced the current dress to the arm pits.

 Then I drew a straight line from the end of the arm pits to the corners of the shirt bottom hem.

Before cutting out I put pins on the line and then in other places around what will be the dress to hold it together.

Now, on the blue one I also cut out the neck to be square to imitate Belle's dress.  On the two I did this week I left the original neck lines in tact.  Then cut out the dress from the bottom corners to the top of the straps.

Sew a straight line from the corner of the bottom hem to the end of the arm pit holes.  Turn right side out and you are done!  Ten minutes and you have a cute little jumper dress.

Now, I did try these on her.  The arm pits are a little big.  I may take up the straps a bit to make them were she would be able to wear them without a shirt under.  Or they may make good pool cover ups.

This is her Belle dress.  I used a Men's small shirt for the blue one.  The red & orange shirts were mediums and I made the body a bit wider.

Bonus of the blue one was I was able to cut a strip from one of the sleeves to make her a matching blue "ribbon" for her hair.

This is the red shirt.  You can tell the difference in the collar.  I left the original t-shirt collar intact. You can also see this one is a bit more loose fitting than the blue one.