Altered: Dress to Shirt Easy Refashions

Sometimes when I'm thrifting, I come across adorable dresses that are just flat out too short for me. I don't understand how people walk around casually with the ever looming threat of exposing your undies in a swift breeze! Knee length at least for me, thank you. But sometimes the fabric and style of a dress just calls to me and I know they would be just as cute as a shirt. These 2 dresses are 100% rayon, so the fabric is flowy and light and I loved the print on the burgundy one and the embroidery on the navy one. One night I decided to just alter 4 pieces of clothing and these were the shirts.

The burgundy dress is a size Large and came from Old Navy originally. It has an exposed metal zipper down the back (completely unnecessary since I can slip this easily over my head), so it makes me think this is from several years ago when exposed zippers were all the rage. This one was the easiest, so I did it first. I just put the dress on and pinned where I wanted the shirt hem to end, added seam allowance back on my cutting table, and chopped off the excess 7.5 inches I didn't need. From there it was easy to just iron the hem up 1/4 inch twice and then top stitch the hem in place. This took like 20 minutes total and I had a cute new shirt :)

The navy dress is from Loft and is actually a size small. This style with the fitted top yoke and the gathered bust area tends to never look good on me in my actual size (the gathers always... gather... between my boobs and it dives me crazy. Since this was a size small and designed to be loose, it went on me just fine and the gathers stretch out across my bust instead of dipping in, which was perfect. I love the embroidery detail on this and I liked the ruffle on the bottom, so instead of just shortening this I decided to move the ruffle up to the new hem. I did the same thing - put the dress on and pinned where I wanted it to end, then I chopped off the ruffle and the excess 7 inches of fabric. I cut off the original serged seam because I just couldn't be bothered with unpicking it, then gathered the ruffle back up to the new opening and stitched it on. Honestly, the gathering of this ruffle was annoying and the most time consuming project of my night. Since this is such floaty fabric, it was a struggle to get the gathers distributed evenly and I messed around with it quite a bit. 

This was my least favorite finished object of the evening of alterations, and honestly I felt like I ruined it when I first put it on. I wish that I had been more careful with where the ruffle started on my waist as it has turned out just a smidge to high and I think it's not very flattering. I tend to always wear at least some definition at my waist, and this ruffle placement really doesn't give any. It is very floaty, though, so I'm going to try wearing it and see if it grows on me (or if I just decide I don't care). 

If I had added an inch to the main shirt before cutting, the waist would be in the right place, but then the ruffle itself would have needed to be shortened. So it's a bit of a trade off. We will see how I like it as time goes on.

This turned out to be a very productive evening of alterations and I got 3 genuine winners added to my wardrobe. I have yet to wear the blue shirt, lol, but it's still so pretty! Maybe I can figure out a way to salvage it. We will see. I've worn the skirt and the burgundy shirt a lot though. Sometimes it doesn't take much to get new pieces that you can love for years to come.