XXL Dress into a Cute Shirt!

Update: This outfit was FEATURED on New Dress a Day, here.


I don't read many blogs every day, but this is one that I just love, love, love! 


http://www.newdressaday.com/


Marisa does all sorts of cools things with old clothes, but I was particularly inspired a while back when she dyed a lacy shirt, which really made the lace stand out. I decided to try it out myself with an old coffee stained vintage shirt that I found for fifty cents at an antique store. The dye job only came out OK, as you can see, so I decided to chop it up and save the lace bits that turned out well.

Ewww

I also had an XXL large dress that I bought for a Halloween costume a while back, and I decided that these two should come together!

I initially had it in mind to just sew the top lacy part of the shirt into the (huge!) neck of the dress and just take it in a couple inches. My seamstress skills are still developing, and I just couldn't get it to look quite right as a dress. So I chop, chopped again, took it in a bit more, and made it into a shirt!

Dress before I chopped it, and my ball of "yarn" made from the leftovers

After that, I still thought it looked a little plain, so I sewed a little more lace onto the bottom. I decided to just leave the edges raw at the bottom because it was a jersey fabric and didn't seem like it would fray.

To finish off, I took the large amount of fabric I had leftover over from the dress and strategically chopped it to make some "yarn," which is what I used to crochet the flower embellishments on the bodice area. Making strips of fabric for knitting or crochet is super easy- just fold a square in half and do a zig-zag cut like in the picture below. Then carefully cut in the zags where the fabric is folded in half, and you will have on long piece of fabric that you can roll into a ball!

It took me the better part of a morning and afternoon to get all this done, and I could definitely stand to brush up on my sewing, but I am pretty happy with the result. What do you have in your closet that you could cut up and make new again?