Tutorial Tuesday

The Rainbow Dress

With Spring right around the corner, an idea for a rainbow dress entered my mind.

 And not just any rainbow dress, but a soft A-line perfect-for-play dress! One made from upcycled t-shirts!

So I ran to the local thrift store and bought these:

A rainbow of bigger sized, mostly half-off tees!

I figured out that I wanted the dress portion (not including straps) to be about 25 inches. This will give my 5 year old some growing room. So each of my five colors needed to be about 5 inches plus seam allowance. So 5 1/4 inches for the top and bottom pieces, and 5 1/2 inches for the middle three pieces. I also cut the bottom purple piece at the bottom of the shirt to take advantage of the hem! [read: lazy! :)]

I wanted an opening in the back so I cut one of my top, pink pieces in half:

I serged the just cut edge and ironed it back an inch on each side:

Next I pinned one on top of the other to keep them together until after I sewed them:

Time to sew the layers into a rainbow! I serged each color onto the next. When I got to the top two layers of the back, I just serged across the bottom to create what will be the opening!

(Careful to do any pinning away from the serger blades!!)

Now I had a front:



and a back (complete with opening):



Time to cut out the dress! After folding my rainbow fabric in half, I used a dress that fit my daughter to cut the armholes:

And then made it A-line from there:

I used the back as a pattern for the front:

Now I had both front and back cut out. Next I cut 4 strips of 1 3/4 inches by about 18 inches out of another pale pink shirt (I could have used the same pink, but thought this might be cute!):



I ironed in the edges:

Then ironed it in half, to be like bias tape:

I then sewed this "bias tape" to the front top edge of the dress:



and to the back top edge, folding the edges over and sewing them at the opening:

Now I determined the length of strap I wanted and kept that much distance between my dress front and dress back while sewing the "bias tape" starting at one side and ending at the other:

After sewing the "bias tape" around the front armhole, I just sewed across the strap and down the other armhole:

I repeated for the other side and serged up the side seams to finish sewing the dress!



Since I have a snap press (I also make diapers!), I added some snaps to the back opening. Buttons also could have been used!

The perfect summer play dress for running:

and jumping! :)

The possibilities are endless! All pink, all purple, prints... So cute and comfy!!