T-Shirt Dress Part II

On Tuesday, I posted the beginnings of my T-Shirt dress and my desire to take something unwearable and make it into something that I would use and wear time and time again.  Today I ended up finished the last few steps of my dress and came to a very satisfactory and surprising conclusion.  This was by far an amateur take on transforming clothing using improvisational sewing but I'm glad that I got to experience the process.  I definitely have learned a lot from any mistakes along the way but ultimately I have some newly founded confidence and knowledge for any future improvisational sewing I might do.

To refresh any memories of where I left off, I had just finished making straps for the dress out of extra material that I had cut away previously.  My ultimate mission in this project was to try and reuse as much material of the original shirt as I possibly could.  With that said, I also left off with the challenge of re-incorporating the cut off sleeves back into the project...

And so I added pockets!  Burda Style offers a great step by step tutorial on how to add inseam pockets to your sewing projects and so I added pockets to my dress using their guide.

Once I had attached the fabric to the front and back pieces of the dress, I sewed along a side seam, connecting the pieces together.

Finally, I measured and tried on the dress to get a feel of where the straps should lay and sewed them on.

 And there you have it!  An instant beach cover-up dress for those warm sunny days.  A few things that I learned along the way:

-Always try and re-incorporate any fabric you might cut away.
-Sleeves make great pockets.  :-)
-Measure the length of your body before cutting.  I wish I had thought a bit more on that.  The length is a bit short and instead of being a dress I would wear daily, I now have dubbed it a beach cover up, perfect with shorts or capris.  It's definitely still a win-win for me!

My first project without a pattern!  Not too shabby.  :-D