Crystal's Crafty Creations: The Shirt Dress/Tunic

My mid-year resolution was to try and do more creative things just for me. Sometimes I feel like when your business is a creative one, you can loose the enthusiasm when it comes to being creative. So I decided to put down the camera and sit down at the sewing machine. I should admit that I have not used my sewing machine since undergrad. So it's been about five years.

Lucky for me there are a ton of online tutorials, and mom was just a phone call away when sewing tension issues arrived!

I found the idea at this blog, but deviated from the original idea multiple times. I'm not good at following directions, besides this was a creative exercise!

Here's how it went!

I hijacked one (ok maybe three) shirts from Dom's donation pile.

Out came the scissors, first button the shirt, cut off shirt cuffs, sleeves, a straight line from under arm to underarm, remove the pocket, and cut the button lapel from the top of the shirt. 

Sew up the sleeve opening, put the sleeves together and sew the straight edge together. Make sure the former sleeve opening is on the outside of the garment.

Same thing for the other side of the sleeves, i prefered for the top to come up to a point so I didn't cut the sleeves off in a straight line, this is one of the deviations from the original idea.

 Here is the back of the dress, it has a vest feel to it that I really love!

 

One of my challenges was I didn't have any elastic so once again this called for some change!

So my solution was to pin/sew some faux pleats into the skirt. This allowed me to avoid downsizing the bottom of the original shirt.

Finally it's starting to come together, the skirt was the toughest part for sure!

I really loved the way the bottom of the skirt turned out! Still not straight enough for the perfectionist in me though.

The devil is in the details! And I love details! I also added halter strap to the top of the tunic.

Here's the final product!

Side view

Front View!

Back view! Please ignore the purple bra straps!

It was definitely fun! But I didn't get it right until the 3rd try. Too bad, it's time for me to pack up the sewing machine for it's big trip to Lusaka, Zambia. What fun, to do something really creative for a few days!