Toddler T-Shirt Dress: Reusing Your T for your Toddler

There are many different ways to make t-shirt dresses for your toddling little girl.  One way is to take a shirt that fits the little one add a skirt of matching fabric and voila!  Easy dress.  This is what I had in mind when I went surfing through cyber-space and found so many other creative ideas.  Like this super cute ruffles and roses dress. I also found these directions for taking an adult t-shirt and making a toddler dress.

In this picture GBaby is sporting the finished dress with a white long sleeve onesie and her gray T-shirt pants - we'll have directions for that easy project tomorrow!

For this project I invested in a Twin Needle and it was SO worth it.  It took some tweaking of my bobbin tension (little screw on my bobbin case) to get it right, but it made sewing this together so much easier!

The other trick I used for transforming T-shirts into other clothing pieces was to use as many of the edges that were already finished as possible.  It saved the hemming of the jersey knit which can be kind of a pain.

What You Need: Adult T-shirt, thread, T-shirt that fit's Little One for sizing.

This is the adult shirt I started with:

Here's how I did it:

1.  Cut out Pieces: Lay the toddler shirt over the large shirt and cut through both front and back of the adult shirt to get the front and back for the bodice piece.



Then line up the toddler sleeves with the sleeves of the adult shirt to cut out the sleeves.



Remove the neck from the adult shirt to use as the neck for the dress - either cut as close as you can to the stitching or use a seam ripper.  Then, measure up from the bottom finished edge of the adult shirt the length you want the skirt of the dress to be, and cut across.  You should have a front, back, two sleeves, neck pieces and skirt.



2. Sewing

Pin and sew the stretchy neck material to the neck lines of the dress. You may want to trim the front neck line of the dress a bit to better replicate the neckline of the toddler shirt that is your sizing pattern.





Sew the shoulder seams



Attach sleeves to the bodice



Sew seam along bottom of sleeves and the side of the bodice below the sleeve.



Turn right side out and admire your handiwork, you're almost done!



Hand baste the "skirt" piece and gather it so that it will attach to the bottom of the bodice.  Pin the skirt to the bodice, making sure right sides together and sew:



Here is the finished dress:



Do you have a good way to re-use extra t-shirts?  Link your sewing project up on the  Sewing Show and Tell main page.

*This post linked at It's A Blog Party and Life as Mom's Frugal Friday