I’ve been wanting to make Ellie dresses from Target shirts I picked up on clearance. After poking around a few pinterest tutorials and completely destroying one shirt I made this for her today with some corduroy from Joanns.
I would like to add some sort of belt/sash but am not sure out of what fabric. I may just leave it as is. In my first attempt I used some interfacing on the bottom of the shirt because I’d read a piece of advice to do that “to prevent the shirt from stretching.” It ended up looking awful–the shirt really pulled out and away from her body with the interfacing and I decided that the advice was for people not sewing with a serger. I tried to rectify the situation by adding some elastic to the seam but ended up catching some of the bodice in the seam and it was a disaster.
For my next try I think I’d like to gather the skirt by sewing it to a piece of elastic first and then cutting that to just slightly less than the circumference of the shirt so that the shirt is brought in at the waist instead of left to hang with the weight of the skirt. Luckily I have a few more shirts in the studio for experimentation!
