shirt peasant dress

I've had an old shirt of Marks lurking in my stash for a while now. It is a lovely soft Rayon with a brilliantly bold pattern but the button holes had all pulled through and Mark didn't want to wear it any more.

I found this great peasant dress tutorial by Sew Much Ado and thought it would be great with the fabric. Her pattern was for 0-3months and of course Grace was napping and time was short, so rather than do anything sensible like print out her pattern and scale it up, I guessed. I didn't even bother with making a paper pattern. This was not a great idea and as a result it's a bit wonky and rather long.

The first thing I did, after taking the pocket off, was sew up the button placket. As the button holes were all frayed I wasn't going to be able to use them anyway.
Then I cut out the dress pieces, I drew straight on to the fabric with washable marker and had several attempts at the shape. I lined up the centre front on the buttons and used the original hem as the hem of the dress.

I wanted to use the sleeves of the shirt for the sleeves of the dress but once I had opened them out I realized I was a bit short of material. As the hem of the sleeves was quite deep I used it as a ready made casing for the arm elastic. I tidied up the rough top edge once I'd sewn the arms in.

I ran a line of stitching up the middle of the hem to stop my thin elastic from twisting. That also gave the sleeves a nice little frill. But it meant I had to thread the elastic in the arms before stitching the side seams, not a huge problem I just tacked the ends of the elastic in place first to hold it.

Other than that I pretty much followed Sew Much Ado's tutorial.