The Crafting Diaries: The Dress-Shirt Dress

Columnist: Anna Ravenelle

Editor-in-Chief: Yasmin Aladmeddine

Inspiration from Sylvia at Chictopia

This project has been in mind for months; I bought the supplies way back over February break in my first Trader K’s run, thinking it’d be one of the first ones I actually put together. As time went on, the task became more and more daunting until I finally Pinterested-up and got to work.

The basic premise is simple: Turn an extremely large men’s dress shirt into a cute, casual dress. The execution, not so much. Worse so was that I couldn’t find a tutorial that I liked enough to follow; the one referenced above gave me some ideas, but I wasn’t a big fan of the high-low hem with the weird, ruffled cut out back (slightly reminiscent of a diaper, if you ask me). Instead, I set to work on the project with little guidance.

The first, most important, step is to buy the right size men’s shirt. Get one as big and made of as sturdy a material, as possible. It is so much easier to cut down in size than it is to add on. Mine was a men’s XXL and perfect for length and width.

 

Now, the fun part: completely destroying it. Turn the shirt inside out and cut the sleeves and two side seams completely off, like this:

Again, cut as close to the seams as you can. You want as much material left over on the weird shawl-vest thing with which you’re going to be left as possible. Try to cut off less than an inch.

After your shawl-vest is completed, the next step is sizing where you want the new seams to be, AKA how closely it will fit the body (If you’re an well-prepared-for-crafting being, you’ll probably have some sewing pins lying around. If you’re like me, you can use a stapler instead, just don’t use too many or it will be annoying later). Fitting can be done two slightly different ways. The first is putting the shawl-vest on (with buttons fastened) and guesstimating using your own body, then pinning the front and back together while it’s on. This can be more accurate, but also extremely frustrating in terms of getting the two sides even. The second is taking a shirt (button-up is best, but another would probably work) that fits you well — rather loosely but still flattering — and laying it on top, lining up the buttons, and pinning the two layers of the shirt together, then trying it on and adjusting accordingly. I did this step about nine times before I could get anything together that fit remotely well, the first attempt of which was before I had even cut the sleeves off.

Once you have decided on how closely your dress will fit, the next step is to make sure the hand stitches are going to be neatly linear. Mark where your seam should be with something (for me, yellow crayon) that will be visible on the wrong side of the material. That is, use common sense. Write on the side you WON’T be seeing in the final project. For me, this line was pretty straight all the way down (about two inches or so from where I’d cut the seam off), until I got to the same height as the final button at the shirt’s bottom. I didn’t want the material to be too tight around my hips for fear of  opening too much with nothing else was there to fasten the shirt together, so for the last six inches or so, the line was only about a quarter inch from the shirt’s edge (though I didn’t realize that until stitching, so the photo isn’t entirely accurate). Repeat (and make sure the two are even) on the other side.

From this point, there is no avoiding it (unless you have a sewing machine on hand): do the tedious stitchwork along both lines with a color that kind-of, sort-of matches the fabric color. I used a dark gray.

After this, one of the most important (and difficult) parts of the process: cutting the arm holes. Of course, you don’t have to. If you were to stop here, it’d look a little like this. Overall, not too bad.

It’s actually, kind of, maybe, a dress! But the arm holes are ugly and thus, must be fixed. I kind of guessed on this. Basically, I looked at the dress as it was so far and cut into the shoulder seams (as seen above) how wide I thought the final sleeves should be. Pretty thin, I thought. So I drew a nice curve connecting where I thought the sleeve should end and where I had sewn to before, cut on the line, and then folded the fabric over so the raw edge was on the unfinished side and stitched that together so the final edge would look finished. Finally, before you put it on for the first time – make sure you remove all pins and/or staples or you will injure yourself and/or put a hole in the dress.

 

Of course, I didn’t realize quite then how much material is lost when you do it the way I did, so I ended up with some nice side-bra view in the final product, but overall, it didn’t come out too badly.

 

Had I an actual sewing machine at Cornell, this project probably would have resulted in a dress I would actually wear. The stitches would have been more even, and it would’ve taken less than half the time. I also probably would have sewn a line up the center buttons from the bottom to about halfway up to make it feel more like a dress and less like a shirt. Overall, a 7.5/10 for the fact that I figured out  how to make it on my own, but points off mostly because I wish I had room for my sewing machine in my dorm room.

 

 

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